The Mirror
by Helen Grey
Summary: A silent lonely girl, who was born of a dead woman, and sees what no one else can see. A boy who is escaping from a past he wants to forget. A man fighting an incurable illness, the woman who is desperate to not let him go. All of them come to the Mirror, but is this lake in the wildest and most desolate corner of Panem really all it seems to be.
1. Little Prim

Perhaps the things which happened could only have happened to me. I do not know. I never heard of things like them happening to anyone else. But I am not sorry they did happen. I am in secret deeply and strangely glad. I have heard other people say things—and they were not always sad people, either—which made me feel that if they knew what I know it would seem to them as though some awesome, heavy load they had always dragged about with them had fallen from their shoulders. To most people, everything is so uncertain that if they could only see or hear and know something clear they would drop upon their knees and give thanks. That was what I felt myself before I found out so strangely, and I was only a girl. That is why I intend to write this down as well as I can. It will not be very well done, because I never was clever at all, and always found it difficult to talk.

The task is made more difficult by the fact that these are not the types of thing that people speak of at all. These are the things that you bury deep within your own heart. Many who read this will think me insane. Many more will think me delusional. All I know is that the story I write here is a story that truly happened. I am not the best one to tell it, but I am the only one who can. If what I write is unbelievable, that is for others to judge. It is enough the story is written to let people see clearly. It is enough for them, and it is enough for me.

I say that perhaps these things could only have happened to me, and as such, I am the only one who can tell of them because, as I look back over my life, I realize that it has always been a rather curious one. Even when those who took care of me did not know I was thinking at all, I had begun to wonder if I were not different from other children. That was, of course, largely because of the Mirror and the fact that our little house next to was in the most wild and remote corner of Panem. When my few relations felt they must pay me a visit as a mere matter of duty to the orphaned Katniss Everdeen, it must've seemed to them as if their journey was a form of pilgrimage to a wild and savage place. A place made strange by the presence of the Mirror. when a conscientious one brought a child to play with me, the little-civilized creature was as frightened of me as I was of it. My shyness and fear of its strangeness made us both dumb. No doubt I seemed like a new breed of inoffensive little barbarian, knowing no tongue but its own. More at home in the woods and with my bow than with any living person, hunting for game in the presence of the Mirror.

A certain clannish etiquette made it seem necessary that a relation should pay me a visit sometimes, because of the strange circumstances of my life. Indeed, that was how Haymitch first came to the mountain. But I was a plain, undersized little child, and had no attraction for anyone but Sae, who was my great-aunt, and Haymitch an old friend of the family, who was also a perpetual drunk. It was from Sae that I learned to hunt, and it was from Haymitch that I learned to read and write. They were both like me in the fact that they were not given to speech; but sometimes we talked to one another, and I knew they were fond of me, as I was fond of them. They were really all I had. All I had among the living anyway.

I did not know I was different. I believed that all little girls lived in remote cabins. That they were taught by their drunken relatives and that every little girl lived next to a lake like the Mirror. I know now that the Mirror is an old volcanic crater that filled with water and became a lake. It is said that the lake has no bottom. This may be true. It is true enough that they never recovered my father's body. I am an orphan and both my parents were dead before I was born, my father lies dead at the bottom of the lake. My mother lies dead in a corner of the cabin.

This was not always so, once my father and mother had both been very young and beautiful and wonderful. Or so Sae tells me. My father was a trapper who lived here in this cabin by the mirror, but my mother lived in the town and had been the prettiest girl in the town. Rumor had her married to the baker, but rumor has it so often it was wrong. One day my father came down from the mountains and saw the apothecary's daughter. He was tall and strong with a voice that made all the birds fall silent to listen. A voice that was beautiful high and clear and so filled with life that it made you want to laugh and cry at the same time. He stayed in town for a month and at the end of that month, he took the apothecary's daughter back to the Mirror with him as his bride. They lived two splendid years together. they were quite alone, but for Sae, and spent their days fishing or riding or wandering the mountain together. I don't know how it was that I myself seemed to see my young father and mother so clearly and to know how radiant and wildly in love they were. But I knew it. So, I understood, in a way of my own, what happened to my mother that morning when the sun rose upon the Mirror and my father was not there. He had gone out on the lake the day before when a sudden and unparalleled tempest came over the mountains. All the rest of the day and through the next day my mother and Sae had prayed for my father's safe return. Yet the next morning the Mirror was as blank and smooth as if my father had never been there. Seeing this my mother fell like a stone and has never moved since. It is because of this that I say she was dead before I was born. To this day she does not seem like a living thing, she lies white and cold, dead in every way that matters. I was born two months later, but the event did not disturb my mother's body. Sae feeds her and takes care of her, but she never moves. Perhaps if my father was still alive he could call her back to life, I am not enough. I understand in a way of my own, but even now I wonder why I am not enough to recall her to life.

Yet despite the fact that the Mirror robbed me of both my parents it was not long after I was old enough to be told this that I began to feel that the Mirror was in secret my companion and friend, that it was not only a lake to me but something else. It was like a thing alive, as the forest moved around it the still waters of the Mirror seemed as if they were a very patient friend offering me a chance to play with them. Often, I would play in the forest as a child. Yet however far I wandered I could always hear the Mirror calling to me, telling me to return to it as I slipped through the forest. Strangers say that the Mirror is the most beautiful and the most desolate place in the world, but it never seemed desolate to me. From my first memory of it, I had a vague, half-comforted feeling that there was some strange life on it one could not exactly see, but was always conscious of. I know now why I felt this, but I did not know then.

If I had been older when I first began to see what I did see there, I should no doubt have read things in books which would have given rise in my mind to doubts and wonders; but I was only a little child who had lived a life quite apart from the rest of the world. I was too silent by nature to talk and ask questions, even if I had had others to talk to. I had only Sae and Haymitch, and, as I found out years later, they knew what I did not, and would have put me off with adroit explanations if I had been curious. But I was not curious. I accepted everything as it came and went.

I was only six when I first saw Prim. Haymitch and Sae were as fond of each other as they were of me, in their own way and often my schooling came by the side of the Mirror. We would sit out there and spend the day, Haymitch would teach me from his books and correct my work. Then Sae would take me into the forest and teach me how to aim a bow, to skin the meat of the game I caught, and later in the evening how to create a meal out of my squirrels and rabbits. Under her tutelage, I became very good with my bow and could soon shoot a squirrel in the eye from a hundred paces. Yet not all my hours were spent in study and there would be hours when Haymitch would be buried in his liquor and Sae would be busy in the house and in those moments, I would wander about next to the banks of the Mirror and play in my own way. I do not think it was in a strange way. I think I must have played as almost any lonely little girl might have played. I used to find a corner among the bushes and pretend it was my house and that I had little friends who came to play with me. I only remember one thing which was not like the ordinary playing of children. It was a habit I had of sitting quite still a long time and listening. That was what I called it, listening. I was listening to hear if the forest around me and the depths of the lake I sat by made any sounds that I could understand. I felt as if it might if I were very still and listened long enough.

On one such day a great mist came up from the lake and I could barely see a handbreadth in front of me. The Mirror would often do that, have great mists or storms come up around it and make it impossible to see far in any direction. It was part of the life of the place. Such a storm had claimed my father, yet I knew no fear and, on this occasion, I simply ceased playing and sat still to listen.

I had sat listening for nearly half an hour when I heard the first muffled, slow trampling of horses' hoofs. I knew what it was even before it drew near enough for me to be conscious of the other sounds—the jingling of arms and chains and the creaking of leather one notices as troopers pass by. Armed and mounted men were coming toward me. That was what the sounds meant; but they seemed faint and distant, though I knew they were really quite near. If I had continued to play I doubt, however, that I would have heard them, I only heard them because I had been listening.

Out of the mist, they rode a company of wild-looking men wearing garments such as I had never seen before. Most of them were savage and uncouth, and their clothes were disordered and stained as if with hard travel and fight. I did not know, or even ask myself, why they did not frighten me, but they did not. The man who seemed to be their leader was a lean giant who was darker but, under his darkness, paler than the rest. On his forehead was a queer, star-shaped scar. He rode a black horse, and before him, he held close with his left arm a pretty little girl dressed in a long blue skirt and a shirt that was untucked in the back making her look like she had a duck's tail. The big man's hand was pressed against her breast as he held her; but though it was a large hand, it did not quite cover a dark-red stain on the white of her shirt. She was a slight girl with hair as blond as mine was dark, and with big blue eyes that looked at the world with the brightness of life. The moment I saw her I loved her.

The black horse stopped before me. The wild troop drew up and waited behind. The great, lean rider looked at me a moment, and then, lifting the little girl in his long arms, bent down and set her gently on her feet on the mossy earth in the mist beside me. I got up to greet her, and we stood smiling at each other. And at that moment as we stood the black horse moved forward, the muffled trampling began again, the wild company swept on its way, and the white mist closed behind it as if it had never passed. Of course, I know how strange this will seem to people who read it, but that cannot be helped and does not really matter. It was in that way the thing happened, and it did not even seem strange to me. Anything might happen on the shores of the Mirror, anything. All I knew was that a beautiful happy little girl with life in her eyes had come to be my sister from the Mirror that stole my father. I knew intrinsically that the Mirror had sent her and I was glad to have a friend.

I knew she had come to play with me, and we went together to my house among the bushes of broom and gorse and played happily. But before we began I saw her stand and look wonderingly at the dark-red stain against the white of her shirt on her childish breast. It was as if she were asking herself how it came there and could not understand. Then she picked a fern and a bunch of the thick-growing bluebells and put them in her girdle in such a way that they hid its ugliness. I did not really know how long she stayed. I only knew that we were happy, and that, though her way of playing was in some ways different from mine, lighter happier and more filled with light, I loved it and her. I knew she had come to be my sister and, in my heart, I could feel a desperate need to protect and care for her. But she was not mine for long that day, all too soon the sun came out and the mist lifted and I felt a change come upon the earth. As the change took place I could saw her run to the side of the lake and hide in clump of scrub oak near the edge of the lake, and she did not come back. When I ran to look for her she was nowhere. I could not find her. All that was there was the Mirror and, in its depths, all I saw was my own face looking back at me.

I quickly ran back to the cabin and began to make my inquiries of Haymitch and Sae, at six I believed that they held all the answers to every question in the universe. Thus, I asked them,

"Where did she go?"

Haymitch had been nursing his whiskey at the kitchen table and Sae had been feeding my mother soup with an eyedropper, but both looked up at me as I asked and as if they were one they both began to pale. They looked at me strangely and Sae relinquished her bowl of broth and Haymitch his whiskey as they sat at the table and gave me their full attention. Both were trembling a little and I could see the tired lines near their eyes.

"Who was she, Katniss?" Asked Sae.

"The little girl the men brought to play with me," I answered, looking at them strangely in my turn.

"The big one on the black horse put her down—the big one with the star here." I touched my forehead where the queer scar had been.

At that moment Haymitch grew paler still and his face took a ghostly cast as the words were shocked out of him, "Dark Manuel and Little Prim," he choked out.

With a child's tenacity, I asked again, "Where did she go?"

Sae scooped me into her warm shaking arms and hugged me close, for once I did not struggle but enjoyed her embrace as she said, "She's one of the fair ones. She will come again. She'll come often, I dare say. But only when the Mirror sends her and in her own time."

Childlike I was content with that answer and soon found myself distracted by Haymitch as he asked me to read to him. Later in the evening, Haymitch brought it up again for the last time,

"Did she talk to you sweetheart?"

I hesitated and stared at him quite a long time. Then I shook my head and answered, slowly, "N-no."

Because I realized then, for the first time, that we had said no words at all. But I had known what she wanted me to understand, and she had known what I might have said to her if I had spoken—and no words were needed. And it was better.

She came many times. Through all my childish years I knew that she would come and play with me every few days, though I never saw the wild troopers again or the big, lean man with the scar. Children who play together are not very curious about one another, and I simply accepted her with delight. Somehow, I knew that she lived happily in a place not far away. She could come and go, it seemed, without trouble. Sometimes I found her and sometimes she found me. I knew however that I would only find her when I was alone and only when I was listening for her. After our first meeting, she would dress in other colors but the ducktail remained even as the red stain was gone; but no matter what she wore she was always my Prim, with the big blue eyes and the fair, transparent face, the very fair little face. As I had noticed the strange, clear pallor of the rough troopers, so I noticed that she was curiously fair. And as I occasionally saw other persons with the same sort of fairness, I thought it was a purity of complexion special to some, but not to all. I was not fair like that, and neither was anyone else I knew.

Among other things, although I aged Prim continued to be the same little girl that came to me so many years ago. Until one day she no longer came to play. I missed her at first, it was not with a sense of grief or final loss. She had only gone somewhere.


	2. The Boy with the Bread

**I do not own anything in this story, all characters and most situations belong to greater and more talented people than I am. Mainly Suzanne Collins, but also the random authors I have read over the years that were the inspiration for this story.**

It was shortly after Prim's disappearance that Haymitch began to take his self-appointed duties as my tutor seriously. Haymitch had been a lawyer before the death of Maysilee and his dependence on drink, as such I received a very classical education. Haymitch brought many books out of hiding and I spent hours reading Montesquieu, Danton, and Blackstone. He also took great pains to teach me Latin, Greek and gave me innumerable opportunities to explore the legends of Panem. It was a strange education for any child, and no doubt made me more than ever unlike others. But my life was the life I loved.

At one-point, Haymitch attempted to take me to the town to have me learn as other children did. I think he and Sae had seen that my nature might be seen by others as odd and was attempting to show me a world that did not include the mirror. I was miserable in town. We had left Sae and the body of my mother behind, because of the difficulty involved in moving my mother's body, and it was just Haymitch and I. We have the same sharpness to us, and in a way, we have the same nature. We are an odd but companionable pair. Haymitch maybe drunk and an absolute slob but in his own way he loved me, and my knowledge of that made his faults easier to bear. It was not living with Haymitch that made town hard to bear. It was my own oddity and the townspeople's fear of the Mirror. All too often I would walk down the street and hear whispers of "Witch Girl" in my wake. As I have said before, I had been an unattractive child and I was a plain, uninteresting sort of girl. I was shy and could not talk to people, so of course, I bored them and gave them very little chance to know me. I know now that their fear came from their awe of the Mirror and the fact that this was the only thing they knew of me. I was from the Mirror and the Mirror was an unknown entity that scared them and awed them in equal measure.

In all my time in town, I only found one friend, the boy with the bread. I know now that his name is Peeta Mellark, but in my own head, I will always think of him as the boy with the bread. Our strange meeting came about in an interesting way. A group of the boys and girls had realized that no one would say a word if they harassed the witch girl. As such I attracted their attention. If I had been any less solitary and odd they might have made me miserable. Yet as it was their jeers were more of an inconvenience than anything else. I have very little doubt that it was the very strangeness of my response to them that made them take a more involved course of action. In this particular case that involved stealing my lunch and pushing me into the trash bin behind the bakery. As I began my dispirited climb from the trash heap, I saw a boy come out of the bakery with a red welt on his face and a loaf of burnt bread in his hands, the boy with the bread. I had seen him before and never really taken notice of him, but as our eyes met I felt something string between us, a kinship of sorts. In its own way, it was both an odd thing and it must have scared us both a little. For I found myself turning away from him. I had never felt such a kinship with anyone else but Prim. With Prim it had not scared me, perhaps it was because she was so fair and beautiful, but this boy had more of an earthy beauty and this strange feeling frightened me. Yet I did not get far. The boy followed me and quickly handed me the loaf of bread with a hurried stuttered explanation,

"This is for your lunch. I saw it get taken. I'm sorry I didn't help."

I had no time to tell him that he couldn't have helped or even a thank you, after that speech he raced back into the bakery. But I felt something stir inside me then, perhaps it was hope. Hope that perhaps one day there would be something in the world for me other than Haymitch and Sae. Until this time I had never thought of my future. I had assumed that I would always live by the Mirror with Haymitch and Sae. But time in town had taught me that there were other futures, a with Peeta's loaf of bread I found myself wondering what else the world might hold, and if, perhaps, I wanted to see a little of it before the Mirror called me home.

In the short time after this that I remained in town, I found myself watching Peeta Mellark closely. Due to my shy nature and inability to speak to people I am not familiar with, I never took the opportunity to tell him to thank you, and to tell him how much his bread meant to me. Instead, I found myself watching him. I seemed to have found him enthralling, and I liked what I saw. He was strong, lifting bags of flours in the bakery much larger than a boy his age should have been able to and he was kind, with a good word and a happy smile for everyone. Perhaps the most intriguing part of his character for me was his ability to speak to everyone he met and have them walk away with a smile. There were other things to notice. Despite the fact that he lived in a bakery, he always brought stale bread for lunch, a mystery that haunted me until I remembered his mother. Mrs. Mellark was as harsh and mean as Peeta was kind and good, and to me, it seemed as if she hated him for his goodness. Often Peeta would come to school with bruises and I knew in my heart that they came from his mother. I also could not help but fear that the welt I had seen on his cheek the fateful day he caught my eye if that welt on his cheek might not have been caused by his generosity. I wished with all my heart that were not the case, but having seen him come with stale bread himself and knowing the warm but burned state of the bread he gave to me, I could not help but wonder what made him burn it.

However, all too soon my time of watching Peeta Mellark came to an end. At the beginning of the winter break, I became violently ill. Every doctor in towns around could not make out the cause of my illness. I knew its cause and its cure. I had been too long without the Mirror and the Mirror was calling me back. Thus, after a time I prevailed upon Haymitch to take me back to the Mirror. After all, it was in its shadow that I was the happiest. As such the New Year found me to be again in the cabin, with Sae, Haymitch, and my mother's still body to keep me company.

"It's not only the town air that seemed to be poisoning her," I overheard Haymitch telling Sae late one night after we had returned to the cabin. "It is something else. She was right. The Mirror was calling her back, she wouldn't have lived if I had kept her there."

After that, the life I loved went on quietly. I studied with Haymitch, and through many trips to town, he made my room a veritable library. I hunted and I walked the entirety of the mountain around the Mirror, and soon there was not a portion of the mountain I with which I was not familiar. I wandered the mountain freely and was happy in my way. All the woods seemed alive and often it seemed as if people might be walking about. Nothing anyone could see, but walking just the same. Not that I was afraid of anything hurting me. It seemed as if nothing on the mountain would want to hurt me. How could it, it was my home and I was a part of it and it was a part of me. The Mirror, the mountain, and I seemed to be of one spirit and one soul. To think that I could be harmed by my own soul or the souls that seemed to walk upon it, would have ludicrous at this stage in my life.

Despite my love for the Mirror or perhaps because of it, I think I was lonely without knowing; but I was never unhappy. Sae and Haymitch were my nearest and dearest, and I luxuriated in the thought that they loved me as I loved them. It may seem as a surprise that I have not mentioned the body of my mother, but I would say that like my loneliness, this was a loss, that if I felt it I felt without knowing it. I knew I wanted my mother to come back for me, but I did not know her to miss her. All my life Sae had been my mother and it was she that took care of my mother's body. Everything Sae touched was hers to rule and she ruled it all gently and kindly. My mother's body, Haymitch, and I were all under her protection care and reign. Indeed, it often seemed as if everything on the mountain was under her rule, everything but the Mirror. It was Sae who noticed that Haymitch had only provided me with the history and tales of centuries long gone by. As she told him,

"She is living today, and she must not pass through this life without gathering anything from it."

"This life," she put it, as if I had passed through others before, and might pass through others again. That was always her way of speaking, and she seemed quite unconscious of any unusualness in it. It was more as if she was wiser than the rest of us and could say her piece, but she knew what no one else did, and remembered it to benefit those she cared for. Haymitch's response shocked me in its reverence as I listened in, all he said was,

"You are a wise woman, Sae," he said, looking at her for a long meaningful moment, "A wise woman."

He soon sent to the city for the best modern books, and I began to read them. I felt at first as if they plunged me into a world I did not understand, and many of them I could not endure. But I persevered and studied them as I had studied the old ones, and in time I began to feel as if perhaps they were true. My chief weariness with them came from the way they had of referring to the things I was so intimate with as though they were only the unauthenticated history of a life so long passed by that it could no longer matter to anyone. So often the greatest hours of great lives were treated as possible legends. I knew why men had died or were killed or had borne black horror. I knew because I had read old books and manuscripts and had heard the stories which had come down through centuries by word of mouth, passed from mother to daughter.

But there was one man who did not write as if he believed the world had begun and would end with him. He knew he was only one, and part of all the rest. His name was Cinna. He was from Panem but he had lived in many a land. The first time I read a book he had written I caught my breath with joy, again and again. I knew I had found a friend, even though there was no likelihood that I should ever see his face. He was a great and famous writer, and all the world honored him; while I, hidden away on my mountain with the Mirror, was so far from being interesting or clever. He would have no reason to talk to me, but I lived every day in the deep joy his books gave me.

Cinna wrote essays and poems, and marvelous stories which were always real though they were called fiction. Wheresoever his story was placed—howsoever remote and unknown the scene—it was a real place, and the people who lived in it were real, as if he had some magic power to call up human things to breathe and live and set one's heart beating. I read everything he wrote. I read every word of his again and again. I always kept some book of his near enough to be able to touch it with my hand; and often I sat by the fire in the library holding one open on my lap for an hour or more, only because it meant a warm, close companionship. It seemed at those times as if he sat near me in the dim glow and we understood each other's thoughts without using words, as I had once understood Little Prim, or had thought for a moment that I understood Peeta Mellark, as if we were connected by a deep unexplainable bond that made us all one in some great thing.


	3. The Woman in the Train

I had felt near him in this way for several years, and every year he had grown more famous. It may have continued that way for the rest of my life, had not the body of my mother finally stopped breathing. I cannot say that I knew particularly when it had done so. If her spirit had been in her body it is my belief that I would have felt it leave, but it was not. It was rather as if her shell of a body had stopped maintaining itself. It felt more as if a clock in the house had run down than if a beloved family member had died. Perhaps that is because I never knew her and she had been dead for so long. All I know is that I insisted that her body be given to the Mirror rather than be buried. I felt as if the Mirror had a right to her. After all, in this way she could lie in peace with my father. The man that she loved so much that he when he died, he took her soul to be a companion to his. As we placed her body in the Mirror and saw it silently sink, I could not help but think that I hoped I never loved anyone like that. It was not that I did not want to love, but that I was scared that I would pin my entire existence upon one person and as such lose myself when I lost them. I knew I would not allow myself to love as my mother had loved, that I would rather live alone than to be so dependent upon one person, and above all else, I swore never to have a child that I could leave to others as my mother had left me to Sae and Haymitch. I knew in my way that the love she bore my father was a beautiful thing, but as I had as a child, I could not help but wish I had been enough to keep her on this earth. I knew I could never make a child of mine feel the blankness I, felt when I thought of my mother. I then decided in my queer way that I would avoid such a fate by never marrying at all. I would never marry, never fall in love, and never have a child. That way I would never lose the man I loved and make another child feel as if they, were not enough.

Perhaps Haymitch and Sae saw these thoughts. Perhaps they simply thought the time was right. I do not know their reasoning and in their own way, they can be as inexplicable as I am. All I know is that my mother died in the spring, and in the fall Haymitch and Sae decided I should go to the city to go to college. For once in my life, I was glad to go. I felt the emptiness in the house after we gave my mother's body to the Mirror and in my own way, I was anxious to escape. For the first time in my life, I was anxious to leave the Mirror. I wanted to see a little and not pass through it without seeing it. The Mirror would always be my home but I wanted to fly for a little time before I settled there. As such when Haymitch and Sae decided to send me to college in the city I lauded their decision. Perhaps I felt as if I would find someplace else where there was a place for me to stand other than the Mirror. I know now afterward this feeling came to me because a change was drawing near. I wish so much that I could tell about it in a better way. But I have only my own way, which I am afraid seems very like a school-girl's. I have always been an awkward melancholy thing and I have little doubt that it comes through as I tell this.

I went by train to the city and although it seemed wonderful to me at the time I know now that it was in all ways like any other train ride. Only one incident made it different, and when it occurred there seemed nothing unusual in it. It was only a bit of sad, everyday life which touched me. There is nothing new in seeing a poor woman in deep mourning. I had been alone in our railway carriage for a great part of the journey; but an hour or two before we reached London a man got in and took a seat in a corner. The train had stopped at a place where there is a beautiful and well-known cemetery. People bring their friends from long distances to lay them there. When one passes the station, one nearly always sees sad faces and people in mourning on the platform.

There was more than one group there that day, and the man who sat in the corner looked out at them with gentle eyes. He had fine, deep eyes lined with gold eye liner that brings out the gold flecks contained in the depths of their green color. When the poor woman in mourning almost stumbled into the carriage, followed by her child, he put out his hand to help her and gave her his seat. She had stumbled because her eyes were dim with dreadful crying, and she could scarcely see. It made one's heart stand still to see the wild grief of her, and her unconsciousness of the world about her. The world did not matter. There was no world. I think there was nothing left anywhere but the grave she had just staggered blindly away from. I felt as if she had been lying sobbing and writhing and beating the new turf on it with her poor hands, and I somehow knew that it had been a child's grave she had been to visit and had felt she left to utter loneliness when she turned away.

It was because I thought this that I wished she had not seemed so unconscious of and indifferent to the child who was with her and clung to her black dress as if it could not bear to let her go. This one was alive at least, even if she had lost the other one, and its little face was so wistful! It did not seem fair to forget and ignore it, as if it were not there. I felt as if she might have left it behind on the platform if it had not so clung to her skirt that it was almost dragged into the railway carriage with her. When she sank into her seat she did not even lift the poor little thing into the place beside her, but left it to scramble up as best it could. She buried her swollen face in her handkerchief and sobbed in a smothered way as if she neither saw, heard, nor felt any living thing near her.

How I wished she would remember the poor child and let it comfort her! It really was trying to do it in its innocent way. It pressed close to her side, it looked up imploringly, it kissed her arm and her crape veil over and over again, and tried to attract her attention. It was a little, lily-fair creature not more than five or six years old and perhaps too young to express what it wanted to say. It could only cling to her and kiss her black dress, and seem to beg her to remember that it, at least, was a living thing. But she was too absorbed in her anguish to know that it was in the world. She neither looked at nor touched it, and at last, it sat with its cheek against her sleeve, softly stroking her arm, and now and then kissing it longingly. I was obliged to turn my face away and look out of the window, because I knew the man with the kind face saw the tears well up into my eyes.

The poor woman did not travel far with us. She left the train after a few stations were passed. Our fellow-traveler got out before her to help her on to the platform. He stood with bared head while he assisted her, but she scarcely saw him. And even then, she seemed to forget the child. The poor thing was dragged out by her dress as it had been dragged in. I put out my hand involuntarily as it went through the door, because I was afraid it might fall. But it did not. It turned its fair little face and smiled at me. When the kind traveler returned to his place in the carriage again, and the train left the station, the black-draped woman was walking slowly down the platform and the child was still clinging to her skirt.

While I was in the city I was to stay with my one of my relation. My relative was a man whose custom it was to give large and dignified parties. Among his grand and fashionable guests, there was nearly always a sprinkling of the more important members of the literary world. The night after I arrived there was to be a particularly notable dinner. I had come prepared to appear at it.

The maid had come to help me with my things and as she did so she began to chat. Perhaps her main purpose in doing so was to fill the silence. I have often noticed that silence seems to make people uncomfortable. At least people outside of myself. Perhaps this is because they cannot listen. Or perhaps they do not listen because they are scared of what they will hear.

Her tongue ran merrily as she helped me to dress up and pretend to be important, But perhaps only one thing struck my attention in all her nervous chatter.

"A great man will be there tonight," she said, "Some author man the master is proud of getting to come, a Cinna I think his name was."

That definitely caught my attention and I believe I even put my hand suddenly to my heart as I stood and looked at her, I was so startled and so glad.

"You must like his books, Miss, I saw some in your bag. Will you tell him so." The girl said, picking up on my joy at the thought of meeting the man I had felt a kinship to for so long.

"There will be so many other people who will want to talk to him," I answered, and I felt a little breathless with excitement as I said it.

"You mustn't let that stop you, Miss," said the girl in a spurt of wisdom, "The man will be like his books, if you like the books you will like the man."

She made me look as nice as she could in the new dress she had brought and sent me downstairs to mingle.

It does not matter who the guests were; I scarcely remember. I was taken in to dinner by a stately elderly man who tried to make me talk, and at last, was absorbed by the clever woman on his other side.

I found myself looking between the flowers for a man's face I could imagine was Cinna's. I looked up and down and saw none I could believe belonged to him. There were handsome faces and individual ones, but at first, I saw no Cinna.

Then, on bending forward a little to glance behind an epergne, I found a face which it surprised and pleased me to see. It was the face of the traveler who had helped the woman in mourning out of the railway carriage, baring his head before her grief. I could not help turning and speaking to my stately elderly partner.

"Do you know who that is—the man at the other side of the table?" I asked.

"He looked across and answered with an amiable smile. "It is the author the world is talking of most in these days, and the talking is no new thing. It's Cinna"


	4. Cinna

No one but myself could tell how glad I was. It seemed so right that he should be the man who had understood the deeps of a poor, passing stranger woman's woe. I had so loved that quiet baring of his head! All at once I knew I should not be afraid of him. He would understand that I could not help being shy, that it was only my nature, and that if I said things awkwardly my meanings were better than my words. Perhaps I should be able to tell him something of what his books had been to me. I glanced through the flowers again—and he was looking at me! I could scarcely believe it for a second. But he was. His eyes—his wonderful eyes—met mine. I could not explain why they were wonderful. I think it was the clearness and understanding in them, and a sort of great interestedness. People sometimes look at me from curiosity, but they do not look because they are really interested.

Yet interested he must have been for as we convened in the drawing-room after dinner, the man with beautiful eyes, approached me.

"I believe," he said, "That we traveled together today without knowing each other. You came from the direction of the Mirror. Did you not?"

How strange that Cinna should know of the Mirror. Those in the town knew of it, and their knowledge had brought me nothing but pain ridicule and the name of "Witch Girl." Yet Cinna only seemed genuinely interested rather than apprehensive and he seemed, no to fear the Mirror, but to be intrigued by it. Perhaps this had been part of the connection I had felt to him, perhaps it had been the Mirror. Goodness knows it seemed as if we had met once, mayhap in a dream or in a dream of a dream.

After that introduction, we began to talk about the Mirror. There were very few places like it, and he knew about each one of them. He knew the kind of things Haymitch and Sae knew. The things most people had either never heard of or had only thought of as legends and superstitions. The things people discounted because they could not see them. The things that only penetrate the dreams and childhood of the soul.

He talked as he wrote, and I scarcely knew when he led me into talking also. Afterward, I realized that he had asked me questions I could not help answering because his eyes were drawing me on with that quiet, deep interest. It seemed as if he saw something in my face which made him curious.

I think I saw this expression first when we began to speak of our meeting in the railway carriage, and I mentioned the poor little fair child my heart had ached so for.

"It was such a little thing and it did so want to comfort her! Its white little clinging hands were so pathetic when they stroked and patted her," I said. "And she did not even look at it."

He did not start, but he hesitated in a way which almost produced the effect of a start. Long afterward I remembered it.

"The child!" he said. "Yes. But I was sitting on the other side. And I was so absorbed in the poor mother that I am afraid I scarcely saw it. Tell me about it."

"It was not six years old, poor mite," I answered. "It was one of those very fair children one sees now and then. It was not like its mother. She was not one of the White People."

"The White People?" he repeated quite slowly after me. "You don't mean that she was not a Caucasian? Perhaps I don't understand."

That made me feel a trifle shy again. Of course, he could not know what I meant. How silly of me to take it for granted that he would!

"I beg pardon. I forgot," I even stammered a little. "It is only my way of thinking of those fair people one sees, those very fair ones, you know—the ones whose fairness looks almost transparent. There are not many of them, of course; but one can't help noticing them when they pass in the street or come into a room. You must have noticed them, too. I always call them, to myself, the White People, because they are different from the rest of us. The poor mother wasn't one, but the child was. Perhaps that was why I looked at it, at first. It was such a lovely little thing, and the whiteness made it look delicate, and I could not help thinking—" I hesitated because it seemed almost unkind to finish.

"You thought that if she had just lost one child she ought to take more care of the other," he ended for me. There was a deep thoughtfulness in his look as if he were watching me. I wondered why.

"I wish I had paid more attention to the little creature," he said, very gently. "Did it cry?"

"No," I answered. "It only clung to her and patted her black sleeve and kissed it, as if it wanted to comfort her. I kept expecting it to cry, but it didn't. It made me cry because it seemed so sure that it could comfort her if she would only remember that it was alive and loved her. I wish I wish death did not make people feel as if it filled all the world—as if, when it happens, there is no life left anywhere. The child who was alive by her side did not seem a living thing to her. It didn't matter."

I had never said as much to anyone before, but his watching eyes made me forget my shy wordlessness.

"It didn't matter," he repeated after me. The low gentleness of his voice seemed something I had known always. Its earnestness pierced me as he said,

"What do you feel about it—death?"

In a flash, I remembered my mother and the many years that I lived with her body, a body that was a shell. A place she was not. I answered slowly and softly,

"That sometimes death is straightforward, but that sometimes it's a little more complicated. Sometimes the person leaves but their body is left behind."

Cinna's eyes were both filled with wisdom and interest, as he said,

"But the body gets left behind?"

In answer to his question, I began to tell him the story of my parents and my mother's body. Yet despite the fact that I had chosen to tell a story to a storyteller there was no nervousness within me that I would bungle the story in my schoolgirl way. This was the story of the Mirror and the story of the parents, and I felt that on some deeper level I was simply telling Cinna a story he already knew. As if in some time and in some way, he had heard my story or knew in advance what the story would be and was, in his way, more asking me to clarify my story in my own head than as if it was to hear an unknown tale. I ended my tale by saying,

"And so, in a way, I am not sure if what people believe about death is true or not in its way. My mother believed in the separation it causes enough that she let that alone kill her, and goodness knows that poor mother in the train believed in it. She believed nothing else; everything else was gone."

"I wonder what would have happened if you had spoken to her about the child?" he said, slowly, as if he were trying to imagine it.

"I'm a very shy person. I should never have the courage to speak to a stranger," I answered.

"I'm afraid I'm a coward, too. She might have thought me interfering."

"She might not have understood," he murmured.

"It was clinging to her dress when she walked away down the platform," I went on. "I dare say you noticed it then?"

"Not as you did. I wish I had noticed it more," was his answer. "Poor little White One!"

That led us into our talk about the White People. He said he did not think he was exactly an observant person in some respects. Remembering his books, which seemed to be the work of a man who saw and understood everything in the world, I could not comprehend his thinking that, and I told him so. But he replied that what I had said about my White People made him feel that he must be abstracted sometimes and miss things. He did not remember having noticed the rare fairness I had seen. He smiled as he said it, because, of course, it was only a little thing—that he had not seen that some people were so much fairer than others.

"But it has not been a little thing to you, evidently. That is why I am even rather curious about it," he explained. "It is a difference definite enough to make you speak almost as if they were of a different race from ours."

I sat silent a few seconds, thinking it over. Suddenly I realized what I had never realized before.

"Do you know," I said, as slowly as he himself had spoken, "I did not know that was true until you put it into words. I am so used to thinking of them as different, somehow, that I suppose I do feel as if they were almost like another race, in a way."

"I dare say that is a good simile," he reflected. "Are they different when you know them well?"

"I have never known one but Little Prim," I said thinking it over.

He did start then, in the strangest way.

"What!" he exclaimed. "What did you say?"

I was quite startled myself. Suddenly he looked pale, and his breath caught itself.

"I have never known any but Little Prim. She was only a child who played with me," I stammered, "when I was little."

His eyes had a strange light in them as if he had heard something that he expected but did not dare believe in then he collected himself and said,

"I beg your pardon," he apologized. "I have been ill and am rather nervous. I thought you said something you could not possibly have said. I almost frightened you. And you were only speaking of a little playmate. Please go on."

"I was only going to say that she was fair like that, fairer than anyone I had ever seen; but when we played together she seemed like any other child. She was the first I ever knew."

I then began to tell him about Little Prim about the misty day and how had I sat there to listen about the pale troopers and the big, lean leader who carried Prim before him on his saddle. I have never told anyone the whole story before, not even Haymitch and Sae, but I told it now. He seemed to be so interested as if the little story quite fascinated him. It was only an episode, but it brought in the weirdness of the Mirror the things hiding in the white mist, and so many other things such as my archery lessons or the strange life that Haymitch, Sae, and I lived. It was dreadful to talk so much about oneself. But he listened so. His eyes never left my face, they watched and held me as if he were enthralled. Sometimes he asked a question.

"I wonder who they were—the horsemen?" he pondered. "Did you ever ask Little Prim who they were to her?"

"We were both too little to care. We only played," I answered him. "And they came and went so quickly that they were only a sort of dream, or maybe a dream within a dream. It is hard to say but it never occurred to me to ask."

"They seem to have been a strange lot. Wasn't Haymitch curious about them?" he suggested.

"Haymitch never was curious about anything," I said. "Perhaps he knew something about them and would not tell me. There is much that Haymitch and Sae do not tell me. They seem to want to save me from the things that are ugly, perhaps he did not tell me because it's an ugly story. They always wanted to protect me and aid me to grow, though perhaps they try to protect me too much from ugly things. Yet, this is not really a thing to complain of, all in all, they are very good to me."

"Yes, they are good," he said, thoughtfully. Then added in a half murmur, "And perhaps their method is the right way. I wonder how this will end?"

This, however, was obviously not something he meant for me to hear and as such I ignored it, or rather I did not ask what he meant by it. Instead, we continued to talk about other things. He was not a man who had the air of making confidences or talking about himself, but before we parted I seemed to know him and his surroundings as if he had described them. A mere phrase of his would make a picture. Such a few words made his wife quite clear to me. They loved each other in an exquisite, intimate way. She was a beautiful person. Artists had always painted her. He and she were completely happy when they were together. They lived in a house in the country, and I could not at all tell how I discovered that it was an old house with beautiful chimneys and a very big garden with curious high walls with corner towers around it. He only spoke of it briefly, but I saw it as a picture; and always afterward, when I thought of his wife and the apple trees that he told me she loved so thoroughly.

It was to those apple trees that he invited me to come the next weekend after I had settled at college. When we rose to go and join the rest of the party, he stood a moment and glanced around the room at our fellow-guests.

"Are there any of your White People here to-night?" he said, smiling. "I shall begin to look for them everywhere."

I glanced over the faces carelessly. "There are none here to-night," I answered, and then I flushed because he had smiled. "It was only a childish name I gave them," I hesitated. "I forgot you wouldn't understand. I dare say it sounds silly."

He looked at me so quickly.

"No! no! no!" he exclaimed. "You mustn't think that! Certainly not silly."

I do not think he knew that he put out his hand and gently touched my arm, as one might touch a child to make it feel one wanted it to listen.

"You don't know," he said in his low, slow voice, "how glad I am that you have talked to me. I know it is not your habit to talk to strangers, but I had a great desire to meet you. I can only be honored that you chose to tell me so much of yourself."

I looked at him puzzled for a moment and then said,

"It is because of the Mirror, it's a part of me and a part of you. I think you must've seen it in me. It connects us in a way."

His eyes had a graveness and a timelessness to them as he answered me,

"You are more right than you know. The Mirror connects us. However, I will tell me you more about that this weekend. If I will see you there?"

"You will."

"Then I will let you go, Mockingjay." I startled at the name, but he raised his hand to stop me. "I will tell you this weekend" with those cryptic words he left me.


	5. The Pictures

**I really do own absolutely nothing, really I own very little in the world, but I own nothing that pertains to this story. That is the property of far greater minds than I am.**

Friday found me in at a small tea party under the apple trees. They were big and wonderful. It is no wonder that Cinna and his wife loved them. Their great branches spread out farther than I had ever seen the branches of an apple-tree spread before. They were gnarled and knotted and beautiful with age and conquered adversary. Their shadows upon the grass were velvet, deep and soft. Such a tree could only have lived its life in such a garden. At least it seemed so to me. The high, dim-colored walls, with their curious, low corner towers and the leafage of the wall fruits spread against their brick, enclosed it embracingly as if they were there to take care of it and its beauty. But the trees themselves seemed to have grown there in all its dignified loveliness of shadow to take care of the couple that lived in the sprawling house under them. Indeed, in a way, they almost seemed as if they were conscious of the couple in all their beauty and wisdom and were eminently proud of their beauty and accomplishments.

Cinna's wife, Portia, was of that rare league of beauty who is always described as being elegant and accomplished. When she rose from her chair under the apple-tree boughs and came forward to meet me that afternoon, the first things which struck me were her height and slenderness and her light step. Then I saw that her clear profile seemed cut out of marble and that her head was a beautiful shape and was beautifully set. Its every turn and movement was exquisite. The mere fact that both her long, slender, hands enfolded mine thrilled me. I wondered if it were possible that she could be unaware of her loveliness. Beautiful people are thrilling to me, and Portia has always seemed more so than anyone else. This is what her Cinna once said of her in the inscription of one of his books:

"She is not merely beautiful; she is Beauty—Beauty's very spirit moving about among us mortals; pure Beauty."

She was delightful. I soon found myself talking to her with the same ease that I had found myself talking to her husband. We spoke long of the Mirror and the mystery and beauty surrounding it, of Haymitch and Sae, of her work illustrating her husband's books and of their numerous travels to obscure places They had been so many places and seen so much of the world that I would have been overawed if they had been any less welcoming. As it was I was free to join in and speak to them both without feeling inferior for the limited reach of my experiences. This comfort was aided by their interest in all they that they did inspire me to say. I was happy. In my secret heart, I began to ask myself if it could be true that they made me feel a little as if I somehow belonged to someone. I had always seemed so detached from everyone. I had not been miserable about it, and I had not complained to myself; I only accepted the detachment as part of my kind of life. My life had been so narrow. I only had Haymitch, Sae, the Mirror, and memories of a Boy with the Bread, and his kind blue eyes.

Later in the afternoon, the other guests began to arrive. It was apparently a sort of daily custom—that people who evidently adored the young couple dropped in to see and talk to them every afternoon. They were clever and attractive and it was very easy to see that they were used to gathering other clever and attractive people around them. It was with great awe that I realized that rather than let me drift away and hide in a corner as I so often do at parties, they actually drew me into the conversation, introducing me to their friends as a good friend that had come to visit them. There was an interesting elderly man who came among the rest of the guests. I was interested in him even before she spoke to me of him. He had a handsome, aquiline face which looked very clever. His talk was brilliantly witty. When he spoke, people paused as if they could not bear to lose a phrase or even a word. But in the midst of the trills of laughter surrounding him his eyes were unchangingly sad. His face laughed or smiled, but his eyes never.

"He is one of the greatest politicians in Panem and the most brilliant man," Portia said to me, quietly. "But he is the saddest, too. He had a lovely daughter who was killed instantly, in his presence, by a fall. They had been inseparable companions and she was the delight of his life. That strange, fixed look has been in his eyes ever since. I know you have noticed it."

We were walking about among the flower-beds after tea, and Cinna was showing me a cloud of blue larkspurs in a corner when I saw something which made me turn toward him rather quickly.

"There is one!" I said. "Do look at her! Now you see what I mean! The girl standing with her hand on Mr. Artibus' arm."

Mr. Artibus was the brilliant man with the sad eyes. He was standing looking at a mass of white-and-purple iris at the other side of the garden. There were two or three people with him, but it seemed as if for a moment he had forgotten them—had forgotten where he was. I wondered suddenly if his daughter had been fond of irises. He was looking at them with such a tender, lost expression. The girl, who was a lovely, fair thing, was standing quite close to him with her hand in his arm, and she was smiling, too—such a smile!

"Mr. Artibus!" Cinna said in a rather startled tone. "The girl with her hand in his arm?"

"Yes. You see how fair she is," I answered.

"And she has that transparent look. It is so lovely. Don't you think so? SHE is one of the White People."

He stood very still, looking across the flowers at the group. There was a singular interest and intensity in his expression. He watched the pair silently for a whole minute, I think.

"Ye-es," he said, slowly, at last, "I do see what you mean—and it IS lovely. I don't seem to know her well. She must be a new friend of Portia's. So, she is one of the White People?"

"She looks like a white iris herself, doesn't she?" I said. "Now you know."

"Yes; now I know," he answered.

I asked Portia a little later in the afternoon who the girl was, but she didn't seem to recognize my description of her. Mr. Artibus had gone away by that time, and so had the girl herself.

"The tall, very fair one in the misty, pale-gray dress," I said. "She was near Mr. Artibus when he was looking at the iris-bed. You were cutting some roses only a few yards away from her. That VERY fair girl?"

Portia paused a moment and looked puzzled.

"Cassia is fair," she reflected, "but she hasn't come today. I—" She paused again and turned towards Cinna, who was standing watching us. I saw their eyes meet in a rather arrested way.

"It was not Cassia," he said. "Katniss is inquiring because this girl was one of those she calls the White People. She was not anyone I had seen here before."

There was a second's silence before Portia smilingly gave me one of her light, thrilling touches on my arm.

"Oh, well, it is no matter. I'm sure you will see her another time. There is, however, someone I want you to meet. Here he is now. Peeta is one of my art students."

However, there was one friend of the family that I needed no introduction to, you can imagine my surprise and joy when among the guests I saw my Boy with the Bread, Peeta Mellark.

It was odd in a way to see that my Boy with the Bread had grown up. I knew, somewhere deep within myself that he must have grown, but I think in my mind I had always seen him as that young boy with a red welt on his face and his hands full of burnt bread. As a boy he had intrigued me, as an adult, he was a beautiful man. His blue eyes were still every bit as blue and gentle as they had been so long ago. His form had lengthened and strengthened from a boy's potential to a man's strength. His jaw was firm and his blond hair had darkened from the ash of his youth to a bright honey blond, as I looked at his chiseled face and form I felt something I had never felt before. There was still that same feeling of connection and that feeling of hope, a future after a long winter, a dandelion in the spring. The belief I had within myself that there was a future for me, in which I was not alone. It was only now, that I realized that this was because I saw him the future with me.

I had always found him to be a handsome boy, but seeing him now ignited something within my stomach that I had no name for, perhaps it was because of his beauty. Cinna and Portia were beautiful, Little Prim was as well, but Peeta's beauty was of an earthy form that seemed to promise more than theirs did, and I was desperate to speak to him to explore the hope that he gave. Yet I could find nothing to say. With Cinna and Portia conversation had come naturally to me, but with this boy turned man, I was tongued tied. I was so busy staring at him that I did not remember that Portia was still speaking and the next I heard she was saying,

"Peeta does excellent work as a painter. Peeta would you like to take Katniss to the studio and show her some of your paintings?"

We were soon inside of a pretty outbuilding on the edge of the orchard that Peeta informed me was the studio where he studied with Portia. The building was bigger than my cabin by the Mirror, but the plethora of easels, paints, and other things beyond my comprehension to narrate, as I am not among that fabled class of people who are artistic by nature. However, Peeta ignored all of everything and headed over to one corner of the room where a stack of canvases was covered with some sort of cloth. When he lifted that cloth, I could not help myself, I gasped aloud,

"Little Prim!"

Peeta gave a little jump at my exclamation.

"What did you say her name was?" He asked in a guarded voice.

"Little Prim, we played together as children. She is one of the White People. But – where and how did you meet her? You must've have seen her somewhere to have painted her as you did."

As I spoke I took a closer look at the painting. It was my Little Prim as she had looked on the first day I ever saw her. She was wearing the long white shirt and skirt combo, complete with ducktail that was her favorite outfit, but the whole thing was done in shades of black, white and silver. The only color on the whole picture was the bunch of bluebells and ferns she had thrust into her waistband to hide the ugly red stain that had been there the first time we met. That was the only color as if Peeta had been, in a way, trying to draw attention to them, as if they were the focal point of the picture.

As I had been contemplating his painting Peeta had been saying in a hesitant tone beside me.

"I have but I haven't seen her. I saw her in a dream, or maybe it was a trance. Portia tells me that right before I paint my eyes grow black and I seem to disappear within myself for a time. When I am done I seem to paint or draw with a single-minded purpose, and when I am done, these paintings are what is left. I paint other things, of course, things I can remember painting. I used to decorate all the cakes."

"What cakes?"

"At home. The iced ones for the bakery," he says.

He means the ones they display in the windows. Fancy cakes with flowers and pretty things painted in the frosting. They're for birthdays and New Year's Day. When I was in the square I would often find myself going over to look at them on my way to the house that Haymitch and I shared after I finished school.

"Those were beautiful!" I tell him.

Peeta blushes and looks at the floor.

"Thank you," he says, "I don't have anything like that here today. But if you'd like, I can show you another time."

I meet his blue eyes and say softly,

"I'd like that."

Whether it was for a moment or for an hour that we stood there looking at each other in that way I cannot say, for a moment I think we both lost track of time. Peeta was the first to break the spell that seemed to have fallen between us as he said with a self-deprecating chuckle,

"Well, I suppose we better look at the rest of the pictures. Before Portia and Cinna start to wonder if we got lost in here."

I smiled at him, in my shy self-conscious way and his eyes softened as he moved the picture of Prim and the next one came into view.

The next is a beautiful man with green eyes, his features are perfect. He was ethereally beautiful. But in his sea, green eyes, the only color in this painting, there was a touch of mischief. He was holding a sugar cube towards the viewer and there was an all too earthy smirk on his angelic features. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but as Peeta moved the painting, it seemed as if the man winked at me.

The next was of a young woman, in this painting the woman was standing on The Mirror as if she had come from within it. She was beautiful in her way, a well-formed curvaceous body. However, it was her face that arrested my attention the most, I almost felt as if I knew her. Perhaps she was some distant relation of Sae's, they seemed to have the same sort of look about them. In this picture, the water of the lake was where the color seemed to be centered. It was as blue and pure in Peeta's painting as it was in real life. Looking at it I felt a sudden rush of homesickness for the Mirror and for Sae, and this time it was I who moved on to the next painting.

It was of a young Haymitch lounging in a chair with a book in his hands. On his shoulder sat a Mockingjay, seeming to read the same book over his shoulder. An amber decanter of whiskey sat on his desk, but the glass beside it was empty. Then there was one of a dark-haired woman, laying a swaddled baby at the root of an ancient pine tree. On the baby's blanket was a small circular gold pin. It was exquisitely detailed, you could easily make out the design, a small bird in flight. Next a young dark-haired man, a woman, the same one I saw in the mirror every day, but an older version, with her hair up in braids around her face and my Prim with her arms around them both. Then Prim and I playing by the lake with Cinna standing in the distance watching us, the gold of his eyeliner a sharp contrast to the plethora of greys that constituted the rest of the painting. Then there is a scene that I recognized, for it had lived in the back of my mind for years, and from the first moment I had seen Peeta again, it had moved to the front. A young boy with a welt on his face handing a loaf of bread to a young girl with silver eyes.

I turned to him quickly,

"I never do seem to get over owing you that."

"For the bread? From when we were kids? It wasn't much. They were cruel to you. It wasn't enough to mock you with those terrible names, they had to go further and steal your lunch as well. I only wish I would have done more."

"But you didn't know me. We had never even spoken."

There was a wonderful softness and warmth in Peeta's eyes as he said,

"I knew of you. The year you came to town, the first day of school. You had on a red plaid dress and your hair . . . it was in two braids instead of one. My father pointed you out when we were waiting to line up."

"Your Father? Why?" I asked.

"He said, 'See that little girl? I wanted to marry her mother, but she ran off with the trapper from the Mirror,'" Peeta says. "And I said, 'A trapper? Why did she want a trapper if she could have had you?' And he said, 'Because when he sang . . . even the birds stopped to listen.'"

"That's true. Or so Sae tells me." I'm stunned and surprisingly moved, thinking of the baker, whom I had never even noticed other than in context to Peeta, telling all this to his son, and here the whole time I had been in town I had thought myself to be ignored, but the baker had noticed me and taken the time to tell his son about me. Perhaps I had never been as alone as I had thought.

"So that day, in music assembly, the teacher asked who knew the valley song," Peeta continues. "Your hand shot right up in the air. Then you came to the front of the class and she had you sing it for us. And I swear, every bird outside the windows fell silent," Peeta says.

That made me laugh. The idea of an insignificant girl like me making the birds fall silent.

"Oh please," I say through my laughter.

His eyes sparkle with my reflected mirth, but his tone is earnest as he says,

"No, it happened. And right when the song ended, I knew – just like your mother – I was a goner."

At those words, we both grow silent, him as he realizes what he has confessed to, me as I am first foolishly happy and then confused at my own reaction to his sentiment. I could see myself loving Peeta Mellark, and after seeing my mother's body and having grown up with it in the cabin, a silent shadow upon all that happened there. Remembering my own feeling of inadequacy that I was not enough to wake her. I knew I must guard against Peeta Mellark. He could be my friend, but only a friend. Under no circumstances could he be more. With this resolution firmly in my mind, I chose to ignore his confession of "being a goner" and moved to look at the last painting.

It was a painting of me. But unlike the rest of the painting, this one was in full color. I was dressed in a black, form-fitting, protective suit walking towards the viewer, against the backdrop of the Mirror. My form was suffused with a silvery light, a Mockingjay flew over my head and there was fire sprouting from my fingertips. Behind me, you could see my footprints and each one was burning. This painting scared me and exhilarated me at the same time, and I could not be sure what I would have said, had not Cinna appeared at the door of the studio.

"Ah," Cinna said, "I see Peeta has been showing you his paintings. Earlier today, Katniss, you asked me why I called you the Mockingjay. I think it is time for you to hear my explanation if you would care to come inside." He turned as if to go and then turned back and said,

"Oh, and Peeta, bring that painting you were just looking at with you please."

Peeta picked up the painting and followed Cinna. I was the last one out of the studio, but as I turned to close the door I noticed one last painting. It was of a white-haired man in a white suit, with blood spattered lips and a red rose in his lapel. He reminded me of a snake, and I was frightened of him, so I was quick to turn away. But before I did so, in the twilight darkness, it almost seemed as if he bared his teeth in a gruesome way, to smile at me.


	6. The Mockinjay

**I don't own any of the characters, words, or many of the situations in this story. They belong to the esteemed Suzanne Collins. I'm just reimagining a few things.**

I was shocked as I came out of the studio to see how much time had elapsed while Peeta and I were in the studio. In the studio, we had, in a sense been in our own world, and, it was stunning to see how much time we had spent there. When Portia had sent us to the studio to look at Peeta's paintings it had been a balmy fall day, but now as I emerged from the world Peeta and I had found for ourselves within his paintings, my cheeks were kissed with the chill of the night. Indeed, darkness had settled upon the world and enveloped it all under his mantle. The apple trees which had looked beautiful and protecting before now looked menacing in the shadows of the darkness. The gnarled branches that were proof of their strength in the daylight now threw dark shadows that shifted into darker shadows These shadows had already swallowed Peeta into their depths as he, towards the light and the warmth it promised and towards Portia. Cinna had waited for me, and I could make out his vague outline leaning against the tree of a large trunk. A darker shadow in a world of shadows. Then he smiled, and the white of his teeth flashed just for a moment in the darkness, and as he straightened I could vaguely see the flash of gold above the white and green of his beautiful eyes. The warmth of his eyes and his smile were a reassuring glowing ember in a dark cold world. He didn't say a word but began to silently lead me through the trees. He did not seem to think it necessary to see if I was following, and perhaps it was not, for I followed him and soon caught up to him to walk by his side. Two moving,g figures in a silent, still, and dark night.

That walk through the darkness could have taken forever, and it could have taken but a second. We seemed to be disconnected from the rest of the world and disconnected from any concept of time. For a moment time and space had no meaning. It was just me, Cinna, and the night, the overwhelming presence of the night with all its stillness and darkness. Yet neither Cinna not I seemed to desire to break that stillness, it was a part of the journey itself and it would have seemed sacrilegious if either of us had spoken. At some point in the timelessness of this walk, we had left the confines of the orchard and begun to walk in a sort of meadow. The long grass swayed with the slight wind coming from the direction of the mountains and the Mirror, making the night air even cooler than it had been when I left the studio. Soon I found myself shivering, then without any indication that he had planned to do so, Cinna stopped.

He turned to me, and away from the shelter of the trees, the moon lit up his every feature, and then an odd look came onto his face, the same odd look I had seen before when he contemplated me, yet I cannot put a name on the emotion it contained. It was not sadness, fondness, hope, or wistfulness, but a combination of all of these. It is beyond my skills as a narrator to tell you what was in that look, as such I can only tell you what it was not. Then he spoke and as long as I live, I will never forget what he said, it was not the explanation I had been looking for. Indeed, it was a strange thing to say to a person in a quiet and dark meadow, but his soft words seemed to fill the stillness that had wrapped around the place as he said, with a look that was both apprehensive and exultant, as he said,

"Twirl for me."

Perhaps it is indicative of the trust that I had in him that I did not question his strange request, I simply held out my arms and began to spin in a circle. Round and round faster and faster, drunk on the moonlight and the sensation of moving I span in a way that would make a top quiver with jealousy. The moon flitted across my skin the grass caught against legs I had no understanding of place or time, or even of Cinna, I simply felt. Felt the motion, felt the cold, felt the nature and freshness of the world around me as if, for once in my life, I was a part of it.

As I span like a madman there in a still meadow, as if I was drunk on sensations. At first, in my self-conscious and shy way, all I could think about was how silly I must look spinning in the middle of a field with no one in sight but Cinna. Then I notice something is rising around me. Smoke. From fire. I begin to panic as the smoke thickens. Somehow, I am afraid to stop because my flesh doesn't seem to be burning and I know Cinna must be behind whatever is happening. So, I keep spinning and spinning. For a split second, I'm gasping completely engulfed in the strange flames. Then all at once, the fire is gone. I slowly come to a stop and, wondering what Cinna had meant to show me or make me see. What had caused the flames? And why? And most importantly, what did this mean? I thought surely, I must be naked, the fire must have burnt something. But I am not naked. I look down at my arms, they are the color of coal and covered with tiny feathers. Wonderingly, I lift my arms, or rather my wings into the air and bring them back down faster and faster I pump my wings until I feel the sensation of lifting off the ground, I can fly. I can fly, and there in the dark as I experience flight, I realize something I had never known. I am not pretty. I am not beautiful. There in the night, I am as radiant as the sun.

Down below me, I can see Cinna standing in the meadow, and Peeta and Portia sitting on the front Portia of Cinna's house. The porch lights are on and they seem cozy in their closeness and from this distance, I can just barely hear the rare loud spoken word or unfettered laughter that comes from them. Here, however, in this fertile farm country, I cannot see the thing I desire more than any other in the world. I cannot see the Mirror. Cinna had taken a seat on the grass and seemed, for the moment content to wait, and thus, in a moment of characteristic selfishness, I decide to indulge my homesickness and use my new-found wings to fly home. The gift of flight was so wonderful and the sirens call of the Mirror so strong I felt sure that Cinna would understand my decision, besides he seemed to be comfortable and to almost have expected me to explore my new shape and abilities, and how better to do so than by flying to this familiar spot from my childhood, the mountains and the lake that surround my cabin, the places that call home. The wild and strange country that had created my own wild and strange thoughts and ways. I belonged there I might never belong anywhere else, now when my shape has changed and my world seems to have shifted around me, I needed the stability of my home. I turn and fly towards the Mirror.

The terrain passed by below as I flew the orchards and fields that stretched over this fertile part of the world until I saw the more desolate foothills that signified the beginning of the mountains, my home. Here too the world was beautiful, but it was sterner and craggier. Whereas the orchards had shown their beauty in the green and lush warmth of their embrace, the mountains asked for sterner stuff, even as I flew, I could feel the buffeting force of the updrafts and downdrafts caused by my mountains. It seemed so different to see the hills and cliffs I had hunted from this viewpoint. However, in any way and by any view I would know the Mirror. Eventually, I saw it spread, a deep cyan abyss below me

Even from this distance, I reveled in its beauty even as I could feel the cold coming from it. The small cabin that had sheltered me in the most tender and vulnerable years of my life, along with my two guardians and dead mother, seemed to be so small by comparison. It had been my shelter from the world, a place of warmth and love, but now I realize how infinitesimal that haven was. How big the world seemed around it, how the lake almost seemed to swallow it as it stood, so small and so vulnerable by its shore. I had trusted that world to protect me from the bigger one that surrounded it, I never had seen how defenseless it was. Its biggest defense was the mountains and the Mirror. As I flew above it, however, I found myself seeing those places, which I would have included in my definition of home as precarious allies to count upon, and I began to wonder. After all, if these familiar things and places seemed foreign, did I belong anywhere at all? Or was I simply a stranger, always passing through but never truly finding a place to belong.

The cabin was so small from this height. A mere speck beside an almost limitless and depthless expanse of blue. Yet from here I could see that the Mirror, which I had always thought of as having no bottom did not have limitless depth, with my aerial view I could now see something at its bottom. Even with the keen eyes, my bird form gave me I could just barely make out the image of a city in the depths of the Mirror. It was massive, I do not know how many inhabitants a city of that size could host, I only knew that I had never seen one so large. Even the city in which I lived now did not have the ability to host the floods of people this one could. Yet despite the size of the town, it seemed to be eerily empty and still, as still as the corpse. The Mirror held its own mysteries and I think only now did I begin to realize how complex and deep these mysteries might be. I knew so little about the Mirror, it was my home, but until this moment I had not realized how little I knew about it. It made me wonder what I knew about anything or was there more to all the things in my world than I knew or understood. A chill ran through my heart as I wondered if I ever would.

Then I saw a movement on the opposite side of the Mirror from my cabin, a woman stood on the edge of the Mirror, a woman I had never seen. She was about fifty or so, with grey hair that falls in an unbroken sheet to her shoulders. I'm somewhat fascinated by her hair, since its so uniform, so without a flaw, a wisp or even a split end. Her eyes are grey if they are any color, they are very pale, almost as if all the color has been sucked out of them. The color of slush in the winter, the type you wish would melt away. She sees me and motions for the water, directing my attention back to the cyan depth below me. As she does so I see myself, as a bird for the first time. I am black with white patches on my wings, and then I understand Cinna. I am a Mockingjay.


	7. A Ghost of the Past

**Very little this story contains is my own, there are many great minds out there and I can only endeavor to one day be one of them so that others will write fanfiction on, my thus far unwritten, but greatly desired books, books as now they write it on the great Suzanne Collins.**

When I returned, I found Cinna patiently waiting for me, sitting on the grass and scribbling in a notebook he must have brought with him. He looked up as I landed near him and his beautiful eyes met my, now small bird ones with a look of wonder and warmth. I was glad that he chose to make no fuss about my change of appearance. I have very little doubt that I would have been terribly uncomfortable and self-conscious had he in any way attempted to examine or take a closer look at my new form. Cinna did no such thing, he acted in every way as if there had been no change at all, he simply nodded his head at the strange little bird that alighted near him. Much in the same way, he would have nodded at the strange little girl whose form, I usually took, had she walked up in a similar fashion. The only wonder he expressed was in his eyes, and these made me feel a deep sense of peace. This was one of Cinna's greatest skills, whether as a writer or, as I now knew, as a person. In a world that seemed to betray you in every way, Cinna could make you feel peace. My world had just gone topsy-turvy in the many revelations of the day and I was thankful, to feel, in his presence, as if everything was going to be all right. That despite all the uncertainties and changes of the day I was still me, and that simply being me was enough. It is always pleasant to feel that you are enough.

For the moment, however, I was a bird and I tilted my head at him in the inquiry that my mouth could no longer make. He must have understood my silent question for his eyes showed traces of amusement as he answered it

"Clear your mind, Katniss, and feel the world around you. When you were spinning you stopped thinking of space and time and simply thought of the sensations that surrounded you. I need you to do the same thing now, clear your mind, and concentrate on the coolness of the night air and the fire in your heart and soul. Then concentrate on letting that fire fill you until your soul sets her body alight and you become the girl on fire, ignited from the spirit you hold within. When the flames dissipate, you will once more take the shape of a girl. Then I have no doubt that you will have many questions for me."

I did as he said and once more concentrated on the world around me, emptying my mind of thought and simply choosing to be. In this state I could feel the fire he spoke of in a spot near my chest and as I gave it strength and power the sensation filled my whole body until I once again noticed smoke rising around. This time, however, there was no feeling of panic and I welcomed the flames in the same way that one might welcome an old friend. The engulf me and as I step out, I realize that I am once more in the familiar shape I have worn since my birth. The shape of a small tan girl, wearing a blue dress and a coronet of braids on my head.

Cinna smiled at me, and said in his congenial way,

"So now you see why I call you the Mockingjay."

Yes, now indeed I understand his cryptic comments in calling me the Mockingjay, and as I flew, I had a multitude of questions that I was anxious that he should answer, but in that instance, I realized that there was one question I desired to have answered above all others.

"How did you know?" I asked. "How did you know that I would turn into a bird? That such a thing was possible at all? Can you do it?"

Now the amusement in his eyes was inescapable as he said,

"My Great-Great grandmother told me to look for Katniss Everdeen and that she would come from the Mirror. She also told me that she would be the Mockingjay."

Your Great-Great Grandmother?"

His eyes grew tender and reminiscent as he said,

"Yes, although that would have been quite a mouthful for the eight-year-old boy I was back then, I simply called her Grandma Posy."

"But how did you know that I was the girl she had spoken of," I said confused, for I am simply a thin slip of a girl, odd but not interesting or wonderful in any way, or at least I was not until I became the Mockingjay. So how could Cinna, a great man and a genius in his field know that I was the girl he had been told to look for by his grandmother, and how could have such a thing stuck with him over so many years. For although Cinna seemed timeless, in a way, I knew he could not be younger than eight and twenty, nor older than five and thirty. I think perhaps that it was his knowledge of the old legends and his interest in all things that were in the past, while never losing sight of the present and the future that gave him this sense of timelessness. It did not seem as if he had a beginning or an end, he seemed to have always been there, to have always lived in this house with Portia and all the happiness and love that the two of them seemed to embody.

In fact, the thought of Cinna as a man with a past, a family, and most especially as an eight-year-old boy listening to tales on his great-great grandmother's knee was one that I could hardly reconcile with seemingly ever the calm and collected man who sat before me. He was a kind man, a good one, and a great one, but he also seemed to have perfect control of his emotions and his words. This same control was exhibited for me yet again as he told me the tale his grandmother had told him. I would that I could remember his exact words. I am no Cinna, and must in my schoolgirl way and with my awkward cadence attempt to tell a tale that better minds than mine would have been daunted to approach, however, I am the only one who is still alive who was there that night, as indeed I was the only one to experience much of what has unfolded in this story that is still capable of speaking the words that were spoken and reliving the feelings that fill these pages. As such it is my responsibility to complete the tale. I am not Cinna, and do not hold me to the same standard of genius, I am only Katniss Everdeen, the girl of the Mirror, the Mockingjay, but I will attempt to tell this story despite my inadequacies, to be the voice of those who no longer have a voice to tell it in.

Cinna told me that his great-great-grandmother had a brother named Gale and that this Gale had married a wife, whose maiden name was Katniss Everdeen. Katniss was an odd woman in her way. She had just appeared one day in the woods as a babe and no one knew from whence she came, she had no mother nor father, and indeed no one in the world seemed to have any connection to her. She had been found by Greasy Sae, an old woman who was a bit of a town institution and given to Posy's mother, Hazel Hawthorne to raise. In due time she became a woman and married her childhood playmate and hunting partner, Posey's brother Gale. Although she loved Gale deeply in all ways that she was capable of loving, she could not be called a tender woman. Indeed, all the tenderness she had, seemed to be centered around her only child, an elvish blond hair blue eyed girl that bore the name, Primrose. Primrose, however, was easy to love, both her mother and her father adored her, but she was the beloved of the entire town. If Katniss was a cold woman that no one could understand, then Primrose was her antithesis in every way. Katniss was cold, guarded, and caustic. Primrose was light, warmth, and gentle kindness.

Then one day the children of Panem, as it was then, began to disappear, two by two. In vain did their parents search for them, and in vain did they cry, one night the child would be sleeping happily in their beds and by the next morning the child would be gone, never to be seen from or heard of again. This went one for some time until the day Primrose Everdeen disappeared. Then the townspeople realized the reason why Katniss was so guarded, for before their very eyes she burst into flames, and what emerged from the flames was not the woman, the both knew and in their secret hearts feared, but a bird, a Mockingjay.

Not only the flames but the choice of bird had startled the simple villagers and caused them to believe that Katniss was a witch. After all, the Mockingjay was no natural bird, but a mix of something evil and man-made and something created by nature, and an unnatural enigma by the townspeople's view. In some ancient time, the Jabberjay had been bred by a crime syndicate as a genetically altered weapon, this bird had the ability to memorize and repeat whole human conversations. They were homing birds, exclusively male that were released into regions were rival crime syndicates had power. After the birds had gathered the conversations they would report back to their owners, this worked well for some time until the syndicate fell, and the birds were released into the wild, it was assumed that the birds would die off. Instead, the Jabberjay's mated with the native Mockinjays making a whole new species of bird that could replicate both a bird's whistles and human melodies. They had lost the ability to enunciate words but could still mimic a range of human sounds from a child's high-pitched warble to a man's deep tones. To the common people of Panem, they were a bird to be hunted and feared, as a reminder of an evil, they wished to forget.

After her transformation, Katniss had flown away and none, not even Posy's brother Gale, knew where she had gone. Gale grew bitter and callous and angry at the world, the loss of his wife and daughter making him a broken man. He spent all his time contributing to traps that were to surround the town and contribute to the security of it. Then one day Katniss Everdeen came back, leading a troop of wild-looking men, they were savage and uncouth, and they bore the stains of hard travel and fight, Katniss flew ahead, but their leader, a lean giant who bore a queer star-shaped scar, carried in his arms Little Primrose, who had been severely wounded in the chest. This leader has since been given the name Dark Manuel, by the villagers, a name that is most likely not his own but seems to be the only one that posterity can seem to attach to him. As they approached the village, they set off one of Gale's traps, meant to protect the village, and a torrent of fiery torches rained down upon. them. The flames were too high, the troop and Primrose were dead within minutes.

At this point, I felt a sense of horror at my memories of Little Prim. Not because of the fact, that I now knew that the "White People" as I had dubbed them, were what is popularly called ghosts, but at the horrible death the little girl must have died. My gentle playmate had been beauty and light and it was a strange thing to think of her as a tragic figure, but tragic her poor life had been. I could not help but also feel just as sorry for Katniss and Gale, Katniss who had lost the one thing that meant the most to her, and Gale who had accidentally managed to kill his own daughter. Tears fell on my face at this point in Cinna's story, and even now many years later, tears fall again at the thought of what this pain must have been for all involved. I could not reconcile my Prim with the Prim of the story, but I knew instinctively it must be so, and even if I had not the sympathy in Cinna's eyes would have told me so. I mourned. I mourned for Prim, who had never seen adulthood. I mourned for Katniss who had lost her daughter, and I mourned for Gale who must have lived with an overwhelming grief caused by the fact that he, however unwittingly killed his own daughter. Cinna sat there silent as the tears rolled down my face. He seemed to understand and did no more than offer me a tissue. I was thankful that he did not touch me, for at this juncture such a touch would have been unwelcome, he was simply there for me to let me know I was not alone.

When I regained my composure he continued the story and went on to tell how Katniss returned to the village once more, and after telling them how and why Prim had died, making sure that her husband knew the part he played in her death told them that Panem had been attacked by a madman, a crime lord called Snow and that their children had been taken by him to compete against each other in a fight to the death, as he believed that the energy caused by the violent deaths of children would eventually make him immortal. That she Katniss Everdeen, at this juncture she refused to use take the Hawthorne name, having blamed Gale entirely for Prim's death had taught him mortality, by killing his body. She also warned them that he would come again and that when he did, they should look for a new Katniss Everdeen, a new Mockingjay, one who came from a place called the Mirror. That the second time, she would be their savior. Then Katniss Everdeen disappeared into the woods and was never seen again. Gale in his turn never forgave himself for the death of his daughter, for all that it was not his fault and eventually took his own life, my great-great grandmother was only fifteen when she discovered the body of her brother hanging from a rope near the place his trap had killed his own daughter and driven away his wife.

I must have looked very stupid as I sat there staring at Cinna in silence after the conclusion of the story, he told me that night. But I was simply overwhelmed. This story had given me much to consider. Not only did it bring forth into my own mind the idea that my "White People" were actually the walking shadows of the dead, but that I myself was a foretold entity that had some great destiny to fulfill. Both were difficult concepts and revelations for me. It had never occurred to me that my Little Prim was anything other than another normal little girl, if just a little more beautiful and special then I was. She was just my playmate and now I had come to discover that had suffered more than anything innocent young girl should ever have too, and that in some strange way our fates were intertwined. Not only intertwined but her mother had been my counterpart and foretold my coming. How could this be? I was just another girl, neither pretty nor extraordinary. Indeed, if anything I was simply thin and odd, a young girl, awkward and self-conscious. Despite the complexity of the tale. I still had a hard time accepting all that I had heard. Cinna must have instinctively understood this, as he so often seemed to anticipate the needs of those around him, for he did not even ask me if I had any questions. We stood up and in the same silence in which we had come and we headed toward the house.

Coming we had nothing but the silence and the night as our companions, but heading back towards the house Cinna and I had ample company. For although there was no physically there in my own head, and I have very little doubt that Cinna's head was occupied in the same way, I walked with many tragic characters. I walked with Posy, the girl turned an old woman who had lost her sister-in-law, her niece, and found her brothers body one day in the forest, on a walk that must have haunted her for the rest of her many years. Gale, the man who loved his wife and child but had all that torn away from him in one fatal night and had to live and die with the knowledge that in the end it was his own mistake that had robbed him of his wife and condemned his daughter to a miserable and painful death. Katniss, a strong strange woman who loved her daughter to insanity and blamed her husband for a loss that was his fault, but not his intention. A beautiful woman who could not forgive, not even her own husband. Last but not least as I walked with the ghosts who haunted my mind that night, I walked with my young playmate, Little Prim. I could not help but feel that if her opinion on the matter would have been asked that she would have thought that the greatest tragedy would have not been her own death but the destruction of two people she loved so dearly. I realized now I knew very little about Little Prim, but this I knew to be the case, with instincts as sure as Cinna's. Although my eyes remained dry, I had no more tears to give after my emotional stint in the meadow, my heart bled for this tragic family with an ache that tinted my transformation, and even my remaining time at Cinna and Portia's with a sadness that I could not escape. Maybe I did not want to, for as I replayed and replayed the fates of those tragic individuals of long ago, I promised myself that I would not fall in Katniss' traps, and for the first time in my life, I prayed to whoever helps lay down the paths and fates of mankind, that I would be a better Mockingjay.


	8. The Bird

**I do not own anything in this story, as all of the characters, much of the plot, and even much of the dialogue comes from Suzanne Collins and other sources. I also apologize for any mistakes and erratic updates, lots of real life and no beta to blame for that. The one thing I do own in this stories are the mistakes. I had wondered if due to these two things, erratic updates and mistakes, I should simply discontinue the story. However, my thirteen-year-old little sister changed my mind. She came up to me on Sunday and begged to read the new chapter, even as I was writing it. As such I figured I had better continue, knowing for sure that at least one person was reading it. So for any of you that are reading this thank you! I appreciate you reading it and would also appreciate any feedback you may be willing to give. Now on to the chapter...**

I spent that night at Cinna and Portia's house before returning to the college, it was some time before I saw them again. My classes picked up speed and I grew to be very busy. I was majoring in English in History, two classes that catered to my love of the old stories, and the wildland and dreams that I had lived in as a child. It was in this way that I learned that I was extraordinary for seeing the White People and that to see the dead was a skill that was native to myself, or at least as far as I could tell. For although heard stories of others seeing those who no longer had their bodies, it was so different from the experiences I had with such things that it confused me. I also could find no accounts of people taking the shape of the birds, other than a mention of the first Katniss Everdeen that I found in a book on the history of the area near the lake, and even that mention was less than a line saying, "In more modern times there were rumors of a witch with the ability to change her shape into that of a bird were attributed to this region." This seemed such a small mention for such a tragic and painful story that it confused me, but the book was the best I could find on the history of the region and I was surprised and shocked to find that there had once been a race of natives there when the area had first been settled that called themselves Seams. This group of natives were dark-haired and grey-eyed. The first explorers of the area noted their skill with a bow and arrow and the beauty of their voices. These people told a strange story of their own origin. They told a story of coming from the Third World, a dying world permeated by a great evil that refused to name, into the Fourth World, condemning the Third World to be a land of the dead. This world, they said was the Fourth World, but as District Twelve, the area that surrounded the Mirror began to be settled they began to disappear. When asked, their wise woman, a woman named Saemwe said that they were leaving this world for the Fifth, which was relatively uninhabited and would allow them to live in their own way. That the settlers had destroyed the forests that provided for their way of life and the same bird that brought them there a mirror would take them away.

This strange story caught my fancy and I could not help but ponder over it. It seemed to be so pertinent to the unique range of things that I was discovering about myself. This was a time filled with more questions than answers and I began to question not only what I knew about myself, but who I was. If there was so much, I must be, could I still just be me. If there was a me to be. The very core knowledge of who and what I was had been shaken, and I had no idea if my essential being was in jeopardy, or if I was simply discovering more about it. Now I was the Mockingjay, the savior, whatever that may mean, and I began to suspect, a member of a long lost ancient tribe. With all these new variables what part of this was still Katniss. I had always wondered where I belonged, but now I wondering who I was. There is a difference, although I may be inadequate to explain it, before, I had felt as if I did not belong. Now I felt as if there was not a me at all. I know these words do not fully describe what I am attempting to explain, but I am not sure that any words could explain, even if I had Cinna's skill, I don't think I would be any more articulate. This was one of those moments when words become inadequate and the heart is unable to explain the emotions coursing through it. Perhaps the oddest thing about my existential crisis at this time was my desire to return to the very thing that sparked it, I longed to fly again. There was no adequate place to change in the city surrounding the college, but I longed for it all the same. I also desired, very greatly, to see Haymitch and Sae again. In a shifting world I knew I could count upon my home to be unchanged, so when fall break came for the college, I returned to spend the week at the Mirror.

When I returned, I fell into the life in the cabin as if I had never left. Haymitch and Sae heard of my adventures in college with great delight and were surprised and pleased to know that I had met Cinna, the author I had long admired. But I did not tell them of the many adventures and revelations that had happened that night at Cinna's house. I had come to the Mirror and the cabin that was my home seeking normality and I was hesitant to do anything that would disrupt the closest semblance of normality I had found in many months. I did, however, take hold of the opportunity to change and become the Mockingjay. In my new form, I practiced the many intricacies of flight and became at home in my new form. All the Mirror came under my scrutiny, and I looked for the things I had seen that fatal night when Cinna taught me to fly, but to no avail. I must have caught the Mirror by surprise before, for now, it seemed to have a vested interest in protecting its own secrets. I saw no more of the strange woman and her silver hair, nor of the city under the Mirror's surface. Instead, the whole air seemed to thrum with anticipation, the Mirror, the cabin, and all that surrounded the mountains that were my home seemed to be filled with a sense of waiting. I, too, was affected by it, we were waiting. For what I did not then know.

I would love to say that my attempts to keep my secrets from Haymitch and Sae were successful, yet I think they knew me better than I did myself. I knew my secret was out, at least in one particular, when one night as I abandoned that form of the Mockingjay, and became Katniss Everdeen again, a slender odd girl as wild as the land that was her home, I turned to see Sae standing there watching me. She did not say a word but I knew she must have seen the exchange of shape, she simply turned and walked back toward the cabin. When I returned, I could see that by some method of her own she had told Haymitch, for his eyes held knowledge and the tumbler in his hand was filled to the brim with an amber liquid. This tumbler he drained upon seeing me and Sae was quick to fill his glass once more. Neither said anything about the knowledge they had gained, but they both seemed old in a way, and they seemed to regard me with tired eyes. I have no doubt now that much would have been changed for the better had I spoken to them, but I was scared to do so. As it was the changes in my life were things I could ignore, or at least things that belonged to college, Cinna, the orchard, and the meadow. If I brought these strange new things home, I felt as if they would permeate my sanctuary, and that this would somehow make them more real. So, I held my tongue, but this cost me much in comfort in the remaining day I had there at the cabin. I am ashamed to say that for once in my life I was almost glad to leave it.

When I returned to the college, I found a letter awaiting me at the dorm, it was from Cinna and Portia. Apparently, Peeta had an art gallery express interest in showing some of his paintings at an event designed to draw attention to young artists in the area and Cinna and Portia desired that I should come to this event. I was apprehensive about such a gathering but did not feel a desire to refuse. I was, anxious, in a way to see Peeta Cinna and Portia once more. For although the things I had learned in their presence had forever changed my life, they were so good to me. In a world where I had few that were my friends and only two people in the world who I felt truly loved me, Sae and Haymitch. I desired the company of these three. So, with a feeling of apprehension for the night ahead, namely because of the crowds of people I both hoped and feared would attend such an event, traveled by train to a well-populated portion of the city, far from the trees and the fields that whose wild beauty filled my life and were in their very wildness the place in which I felt as if I most belonged in this world.

The gallery showing was all that I feared and hoped it would be. The gallery was beautiful, the walls were a simple dark blue, so dark it was a close cousin to black, and it was separated out by various walls which held paintings. These walls, however, were movable, being fitted on some sort of wheels that could be unlocked allowing the walls to then be moved in accordance with the art the gallery may wish to display, and did not stretch up to the ceilings. It was intriguing to me, being a backwards savage little thing, most used to the wilderness and game meat then a gallery and caviar, to see walls being used for the only for the placing and displaying of paintings rather than for any other mundane use a wall might have, such as to separate rooms in the interest of privacy. The ceiling had been transformed into the night sky and it was just as clear and as beautiful as it had been on that fateful night in the meadow when Cinna changed my life by asking me to twirl.

I made no effort to find any of the three that had invited me here this night, but Peeta soon finds me and with him, at my side, I soon discover the truest beauty and brightest star of this gathering tonight, the food. Tables laden with delicacies fill the hallways between walls that carry paintings and the occasional alcove that hosts statues and other pieces depicting various artistic mediums. Everything that you can ever dream of is represented on these glorious tables. Peeta looks at me with true amusement and perhaps a touch of tenderness seeing the brightness in my eyes as I look at the spread of food before me.

"Not quite like home, is it?"

He says with bright happy eyes, drunk on the environment and the fact that a portion of this event is primarily for him and to display his talent. My own eyes and bright and I can feel my mouth spread into a wide in an almost foolish, grin as I tell him with an excitement, I know is childish, but cannot help expressing

"I want to taste everything!"

He laughs and his laugh is full merry and beautiful, so beautiful it makes me catch my breath. His laughter is echoed by two more familiar tones as Cinna and Portia walk up and hear the tail end of our conversation,

"Well, you better pace yourself," I hear Portia's say. Before Cinna's deeper but just as beautiful voice chimes in with,

"Hello, Mockingjay, it's good to see you here."

In Cinna's wise eyes I could see a wealth of questions that he wanted to ask, but could not articulate in this mixed company, but chief among these was the question of how I was coping with the overwhelming plenitude of information he had thrust upon me that night in the meadow. In answer to the unspoken questions, I tried to relay peace and contentment in my gaze, while my mouth responded to what had been said.

"It's good to be here, Cinna," and it was. These three people had made me feel an instant connection to them and even at that early stage in our friendship, I was happy in their company.

We spoke for a few seconds more after this on various subjects, foremost among these being my studies at college and the events that had led to Peeta's paintings being displayed in this showing. Apparently, it had happened when a friend of Portia's and Cinna's, a connoisseur of the arts named Plutarch Heavensbee had been shown some of Peeta's work, after a stay at the house near the orchard, on a trip to look at some paintings of Portia's. He had been overwhelmed on seeing Peeta's talent and upon learning that he was Portia's ward and student, had recommended his work for this showing.

However, all too soon, Cinna and Portia had friends and associates come up who were desperate to speak to them and Peeta and I found ourselves free to entertain ourselves. We then began the adventure of the tasting the food presented on those marvelous tables I spoke of before. Peeta and I looked at each other with bright childlike eyes as we looked at the tables spread before us,

"Okay, no more than one bite per dish," I said to Peeta.

But my resolve was broken almost immediately at the first table which was covered with twenty or more soups. Among them was one that was a creamy pumpkin brew sprinkled with slivered nuts and tiny black seeds. I could have eaten that all week, but then I tasted a clear green broth that tasted like springtime and a frothy pink soup dotted with raspberries. It was as if spring fall and summer were combined in soup flavors and served under a clear winter starlit sky. Peeta and I acted as if we were ten years old and not a day older, tasting various treats, sharing them, and laughingly comparing flavors and textures. Peeta and I came from the same background and this environment was a whole new world for us. Especially for Peeta, he was one of the stars of the night and was constantly sought out so that people could comment on one painting or another that he had displayed that night. He talked with them politely, to me they were just distractions from the food. All too soon, however, I find myself full and head to take a look at the various pieces of art that are displayed in the false walls of the gallery. Leaving Peeta talking to one person or another, I hardly remember which, but busy being himself, cheerful, self-deprecating, and likable.

As it may be expected I soon find myself in front of Peeta's paintings, as I traveled among them, I looked at them with new eyes. The one with the attractive green-eyed man in it, I still had no understanding of, but the others made a little more sense after the deluge of information I had received shortly after I had seen them, especially when compounded with the legend I had read of while in college, the legend of the Seam. The first one with Little Prim as I had first seen her, a shade of the past. The woman coming from the Mirror, must have been a member of the Seam, although how Peeta had heard of such a story or seen such a vision was a question that I could not answer, I could only speculate that perhaps I wasn't the only one who saw what no one else could see, and the knowledge made me both feel more and less alone, simultaneously. I remembered Peeta saying that he painted after coming from a trance and I could only wonder what else he saw when he went, and where it was, he disappeared to.

The one of a young Haymitch I had always understood, although the empty glass and the girl had caught my attention, Haymitch's glass almost always held a form of liquor, to see it empty was a rare event and the bird on his shoulder. Yet now as I looked on it, I figured the empty glass was a mention of a time when Haymitch was younger and happier, but I could not reconcile that with the presence of myself on his shoulder, no doubt learning from my mentor. I now had a thought, however, that all of Peeta's paintings would prove to be important in whatever path I was to walk, and had very little doubt that all would be made clear in time.

The next of a dark-haired woman laying down a young child, I assumed must be in some way connected to the life of the first Katniss, perhaps the moment she had been abandoned, or left to be brought to the Hawthorne's. Although I wondered where the pin was, I had a premonition that it was the bird spoken of in the legends of the Seam, and felt instinctively that the pin, was eminently important to my own mission, whatever that mission may be. The dark-haired man and the older version of myself I could now easily identify as Gale Hawthorne, the first Katniss, and a living Little Prim. I soon however soon came to the last painting, this one was singular because it was the only one that had color. Each of the other paintings only had color on one-point of the painting, a point I could only assume was a focal point. This one was the end of the paintings exhibited and it was of me.

I was dressed in a black, form-fitting, protective suit walking towards the viewer, against the backdrop of the Mirror. My form was suffused with a silvery light, a Mockingjay flew over my head and there was fire sprouting from my fingertips. Behind me, you could see my footprints and each one was burning.

I do not know how long I stood there staring at this painting or what it made me feel, all I know is that my reverie was interrupted all too soon as I heard Portia's beautiful clear voice, it interjected itself into my thoughts and drew me out of my contemplation of the painting.

"Katniss," she says, "This is Plutarch Heavensbee, he was interested in meeting Peeta's muse."

Plutarch is a large man who is vaguely familiar, although I could not tell you where I had seen him before. He is oily, and I feel no connection to him, but he does, in some way feel important. Perhaps it is because he is a rich and important man, after all, he is one of the sponsors of the event tonight. Bearing this in mind I do my best to be congenial, although to be truly interesting and engaging is most likely beyond my skills. After all, if Plutarch bears no relation to my life, he must be a valuable connection for the three people whose welfare drew me here tonight, Peeta, Cinna, and Portia. As such Plutarch and I begin to make small talk about the party, the beauty of the gallery, and the food, and during this Portia somehow manages to melt away, leaving me to entertain Plutarch. The talk is mundane and I almost asleep with boredom and then he says,

"I have to say that Peeta's paintings immediately drew me in when I saw them. This was the first he showed me, and I was immediately hooked. They are beautiful, but more importantly, they are unique and original. An original is always worth more than a copy, and Peeta's works are, if nothing else, original. A true example of something different. They are almost eerie in their way, but they hold you captive with their strange beauty."

I looked at the image I had been contemplating before and softly,

"I have to agree."

Then Plutarch pulls me out of my reverie once more, as I hear him say,

"Well, I'll have to be going soon. Believe it or not, I have a meeting tonight."

Plutarch steps back and pulls out a gold watch on a chain from a vest pocket. He flips open the lid sees the time and frowns. He turns the watch so I can see the face,

"It starts at midnight."

"That seems late for . . ." I say, but then something distracts me. Plutarch has run his thumb across the crystal face of the watch and for just a moment an image appears, glowing as if lit up by candlelight. It's a mockingjay. A brief picture on a smooth face that then disappears but a mockingjay all the same. He snaps the watch close.

"That's very pretty," I say.

"Oh, it more than just pretty it's one of a kind but so much of what I own is," he says. "Well if anyone asks about me tell them I have left, won't you."

I smile and nod and then we shake hands.

"Well, I hope to see you again Mockingjay," he says, as he pulls away. "I wish you luck."

I would have stopped him to ask about his meeting but as he pulled his hand away, I felt a heavy weight in my palm and if such a thing were possible my palm felt warm and heavy with potency. There was power in the object I held, and I suspected I knew why. For in my hand Plutarch had left a small circular gold pin. On it is etched a very detailed bird in flight, a mockingjay, and if I am correct, the bird of the Seam.

I look for Peeta, Cinna, and Portia, and soon find Peeta admiring a table of elaborately decorated cakes. The caters have come for ward to talk frosting with him and you can see them answering his questions. He is so intent in his conversation that I just barely get a chance to say goodbye, before I board the train and start back towards the college, once more a touch overwhelmed by the events of the night.


	9. Even the Timeless Have a Time

**This story is mostly the property of Suzanne Collins, but my little sister owns the last sentence of this chapter. She is immensely proud of it! She keeps wandering around the house saying it over and over again with a proud smile on her face as if she is tasting each syllable and thoroughly enjoying its flavor. All that being said I was glad to have her help, this was a hard chapter to write. Thank you for reading!**

I expected it to be some time before I heard from Peeta again after I left the art gallery and had made my way home to ponder over the pin that now was sitting in my desk drawer, but it was less than a week later when I received a phone call from Peeta himself. It was a simple phone call asking if he could see me again and making a designation to meet at a nearby bakery that Peeta swore had excellent biscotti, gourmet coffee, and sandwiches. We agreed to meet for lunch at one-o-clock, that Wednesday. However, Peeta must have arrived early, for when I arrived five minutes early, he had already obtained a table inside the bakery and was firmly ensconced there reading a book with a sandwich and a latte in front of him. A few seconds later I had joined him with my own drink, a sandwich, and one of the fame biscotti.

When I walked up Peeta Looked up and me with a grin and I slid into my chair saying,

"So why did you want to meet?" I asked.

To my surprise, Peeta blushed and ducking his head bashfully said,

"I guess, I thought after you turned me down in the studio, we could just take a shot at being friends."

"Friends . . ." I say hesitantly, this may seem like an odd reaction to anyone reading this tale, but unless you count Sae and Haymitch, or Little Prim, I had never had a friend before. My short stay at the school in the village had been more filled with harsh words than offers of friendship, and in my one semester at college, I had avoided people and sought out quiet places where I could be easily ignored. This could be due to that early social experiment. I was odd, I was a freak, and I was a strange savage little thing that was not interesting in the least and that did not have to work to obtain the status she sought, being ignored.

Peeta, however, was undeterred, perhaps having been warned by Cinna that such would be my reaction, and said,

"So, let's start with something basic. Like what's your favorite color."

A smile creeps on to my lips,

"Green. What's yours?"

"Orange," he says.

"Orange, like that?" I ask pointing to a particularly garish sign across the street that had been put up to block off an alley, possibly for some form of repairs. With my question Peeta let out another one of those beautiful laughs that made me feel something deep in my stomach, a flutter I had no name for, but was in every way both pleasant and disconcerting.

"Not quite like that, a bit more muted," he says. "More like . . . the sunset, or piece of amber."

Sunset, I can see it immediately, the rim of the descending sun, the sky streaked with soft shades of orange bleeding across the Mirror as for one second the lake was suffused in rich color just before the sun went down over the mountains. I also picture the amber liquid in Haymitch's glass a sight that many attach to destruction, alcohol can mean death, but because I attach it to Haymitch I almost feel a sense of comfort at the thought and I realize suddenly that in a way I attach the color orange to home and comfort. I had always loved the forest and had spent many long hours there. The sun shining through the leaves would paint the air around me green and the world and I would feel peace, that was the attachment green had to me, I attached it to the peace I felt in the forest. Now, however, I wondered if I would attach green to peace and muted orange to home. These thoughts rushed through my head in an instant and I found myself telling Peeta in a quiet tone,

"That sounds beautiful." Then after my clearing my throat, I said a little more firmly, "Green reminds me of the forest and the hours I spent playing and just listening."

At this Peeta's brow furrowed in confusion and I could sense the question before it passed his lips.

"What's listening?"

I was not sure how to answer this question. There was no answer and as he asked, I realized it was a question I had never asked myself. What was listening? I began to search for the words. I wanted to answer the question, but I was not sure how. What was listening?

"Listening is something I used to do as a kid, I began, still contemplating my answer even as I voiced it and doing my best to chose my words carefully. "I would sit there for hours and not move, just listening to the forest, the Mirror, and completely absorbed in taking in the world around me, with all my senses." I knew this didn't quite cover all that listening meant, so I tried again, Peeta patiently waiting and doing his best to understand a concept that could not be explained and could not be understood by anyone but me. Though I tried to explain and he tried to understand, in our own ways, both in this explanation and in other subsequent conversations we have had on the matter since that day.

"It is clearing your mind and your senses of all the chatter that it contains and just taking things in . . ." I was floundering and I saw no comprehension on Peeta's face, so in my attempt to redirect the conversation I clumsily and as awkwardly as I only I could, I attempted to change the subject.

"But that doesn't matter now, I'll try to explain it better at another time," I said hurriedly. "So, why orange?"

He could tell that I was simply trying to change the subject, but he acquiesced to the new topic thread and said,

"Well, as a baker we would be up with the dawn preparing the dough and other things for the day. I think I woke up at four-o-clock in the morning every day I lived there, and we worked right through the sunrise. But the sunset, well, no matter what needed down in the evening Dad would stop everything and let us all go out to watch the sunset, at least the three of us boys and him. Mom wasn't really that type of woman. She seemed to either want to avoid us or be angry at us, usually in that order."

"So, had did you get into painting?" I asked.

His smile carried a bit of wryness in it at this question as he replied.

"Well, that's a bit of a long story, and it's a combination of what I know and what I've been told by Portia. Apparently, Cinna and Portia had come to town to visit Cinna's mother, his last remaining family, ironically, she lives in our little village. While they were there, Portia came into the bakery and ordered a latte and a cupcake, and received a cupcake I had decorated. A chocolate confection that was decorated in buttercream frosting with a primrose, I had painted in food coloring on the top of it. She approached my mother and asked to speak with the person who had decorated the cupcake. My mother, however, wasn't very accommodating, to say the least, and Portia left without knowing. This might have been the end of the story, but my school had an art competition that same week and knowing Portia's reputation as an artist they asked her to be a judge. My picture had been a painting of a primrose and an arrowhead flower with intertwining roots."

At this point, I could not stop myself from exclaiming,

"A primrose and a katniss!"

His eyes were half amused at my exclamation and half contemplative.

"Yes, I always liked the katniss flower," he said in warm tones. "However, it is the primrose that changed my life Portia recognized it as the same primrose that had been on her cupcake and decided to take me in as her student. In a month I had left my hometown and moved in with Cinna and Portia as Portia's apprentice."

"So, you actually live with them then?"

"There's an apartment in the basement of the house that has its own kitchen and every other essential. It's not a big place, but it gives us all a modicum of privacy," he responds. "Although with Cinna's speaking tours, sometimes I feel as if I am in the house more then they are" he laughs at this thought.

"What happened to your brothers?"

Well, Maize is married now to Gemma. Her parents own the restaurant in town, and Rye left to go to the city and works for a grocer near here."

Then his eyes grew appraising and he said hesitantly,

"May I ask a question?"

"Sure"

"What are the White People, you spoke of them the first time I showed you my paintings. I have been wondering ever since?"

That was a loaded question, somehow telling Cinna had not seemed as hard, possibly because at that time I had not known what I was seeing, but now I was apprehensive and unsure. What if Peeta thought I was insane? I liked him, despite myself, and I had no desire for him to think less of me for something that was outside of my control, so it was with no small amount of trepidation when I said softly,

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you, you'll think I'm insane."

His eyes were filled with understanding and curiosity as he said,

"Try me."

I did more than try him, it was as if a dam had been broken and I told him all that I knew, about the Seam, the Mirror, turning into a mockingjay, Posy's story of the former Katniss, and most of all about Little Prim and the White People. He listened without interrupting me but as my deluge of words came to an end, I found myself feeling scared. I could see not disgust in his eyes, but the thought haunted me and I was scared that the best he could think me was insane the worst lying. I was surprised when he did neither. Instead, there was graveness to his face and he said,

"I can tell by the look on your face your scared that I will think you are insane, but I believe every word that you have said. Of course, you couldn't know I already knew part of it. Cinna had told me his part of the story when I first came to live with them, probably in no small part because of the odd contents of my paintings, which must have struck a chord. He's seemed different recently, and what you have told me now accounts for that difference. He is more cheerful, now I wonder if that's because he now has hope that he will see the end of it all."

This comment threw me, why wouldn't Cinna have seen the end? He was a young man with years ahead of him, there was no reason why he would not be able to see the end even if it was not me as the "savior." I think this was so hard for me because even now, and indeed even later I was having difficulty reconciling the fact that I was preordained. It is hard to think that your every action is affecting others and that you have very little autonomy, but have a foretold and foreordained path that you are required to walk. It is hard to explain but I simply wanted to be Katniss Everdeen, not a savior with a great destiny, and now I was being told that if I did not walk my path, I would cause someone very close to my pain and that my absence in his life had caused him pain. So, it was with a touch of desperation that I asked,

"What do you mean?"

"Cinna has lived for the completion of that story, he was close to Posy, and believed every word of it, despite the fact that he himself has been called a fool for it by other members of his family. Who treated her like she was senile, and the story like the ravings of an old woman." He looked both sad and thoughtful at this moment. "What I am trying to say is it's become almost a part of who he is, and he doesn't have much time left. Cinna has a very rare form of Leukemia, it is uncurable. He is dying, and if you really are the savior that was promised, then your time should come soon, and he might have a chance of seeing the completion of the story he has always believed in. His dreams might come true before he dies, and he'll see the new Katniss as the savior that she was meant to be."

This was as painful as a blow I had just barely met Cinna after years of admiring him and now, I was to find that the beautiful man that I had admired for his intellect and his kindness to myself was terminal. I had encountered death before, but the idea that someone so strong was also so fragile is something that my mind had a hard time understanding. It was as if you had told me that beautiful fortress, meant to stand against the world had been built on sand, Cinna, who I saw as timeless, had a time and it was fast approaching.

"Cinna is dying, why hasn't he said something? Why didn't I notice?"

How didn't I notice? I think we all upon receiving a revelation of this magnitude wonder, how did I not see it? I was wondering this now, how did I miss such a ravishing illness, only to be told that a man I was fast coming close to, was fast coming close to his own end, Peeta's voice broke through my thoughts with a statement that was profound in more than one way and left me much food for thought later.

"He doesn't like to talk about it much, you see Katniss if you dwell on dying then you might as well already be dead, because you've already quit living, and then what is the purpose of life."


	10. Rue

**This is the usual disclaimer, I own very little in the world and even less in this story. I am sure that most people reading this work are familiar enough with Hunger Games to know when my imagination begins and Suzanne Collins begins. Last part of the note, thanks for reading, reviewing, and favoriting and following this story. I thoroughly appreciate it.**

Peeta's words that day pierced my consciousness as few things have before, even now I run them over in my mind in my lowest moments, especially as my life has been so tied into the shadows of the past, the dead, and those who have given up on living. "If you dwell on dying you might as well already be dead because you've already quit living." My mother quit living, and it affected me in ways that I will never be able to explain or make you comprehend. I see ghosts, but no ghost was more fearsome than the living specter of my dead mother as she lay in her corner in our cabin. Perhaps this was because in my childish soul I believed there was some way to recall her to life. I have read that when a loved one dies the people left behind are always looking for them to come back in the door, expecting them to still be alive. I can empathize. I lived in the belief that my mother would someday regain her soul. It was not until her body finally died and we gave her to the Mirror that I finally gave up hope. Not that she died at that moment. She had died when my father was drowned in the Mirror, but that the hope I had that she would someday awaken had finally left me. Now I began to wonder if I had ever lived, had the morose happenings that surrounded my birth and my, albeit unknown, communing with the dead made me dwell on dying, or at least the dead. Or were Death and I so intertwined with each other that one could not walk without the other? Did I dwell on Death, or did Death dwell on me? One way or another we seemed to be constant companions and one seldom seen without the other. It seemed, at times as if all that I had ever loved and all I had ever seen was touched by death. Haymitch had lost his fiancée and both Sae and Haymitch had lived to care with my dead mother. Little Prim, the companion of my childhood had been dead long before I had been born, my beloved Mirror killed my father, and indirectly my mother, and now Cinna was dying. Was there anywhere in my life death had not touched? I had been born of a dead woman and walking with shadows of the past, I had walked with Death all my life. Perhaps the better question was not whether or not I had dwelled on death, but whether or not I had ever been allowed to live. Or if I knew what living meant at all.

Yet in the past death had never been my choice, I had no hand in the circumstances that surrounded my life, and would have given much to have grown up a normal girl. A girl with a living mother and father and friends who called her by name rather than enemies that called her by the stinging epitaph, Witch girl. I would have loved to be normal. Then perhaps there would not be the great burden of choice upon me. I had been chosen for my mission because of my living altercations with death. Perhaps that was why I had been chosen because the things that happened could have only happened to me. I was designed to bear the burden they brought and was designed to see them to their end. I cannot say I am unhappy now that I was chosen, but at the time it seemed an unbearable burden. I believe it was in this time period that I finally accepted the path that I was later to walk, I do know that it was in this time that the Bird left my dresser drawer and was for the first time pinned to my breast. In hindsight, I wonder if this was not why she came to me. As if my acceptance of a round pin was the indication that the main portion of my story was to begin.

The first time I saw her, I was walking in a park with Peeta and we were walking near a pond, I suppose there is a touch of irony in the fact that a lake had been the directly connected to the appearance of Little Prim and a pond was directly attached to my first appearance of Rue. I suppose to explain the full impact of Rue's appearance, I must first make a revelation of sorts, I had not seen any of the White People since that fateful tea party under the apple trees. I wonder now if they were holding back and waiting for me to once more regain my equilibrium, after the events of that night, including my new identity as a bird shifter, I believe this what they call such things. I am not sure but this closest name to what I am that I can find in my books, my only other option seems to be something like were-bird and that name is not one that I desire to carry. Although I must say that I have found no accounts of such things happening to real people, indeed all that happens to me seems to be the denizens of fantasy, legends, and fairytales. However, as improbable as Rue's appearance might have been it was not a fantasy, but a cold hard truth.

As I looked at the beauty of the sun and the sky reflected in the water, I saw perched in one of the trees that overshadow the pond a slim young girl. If I had to guess her age, I would guess ten, she has bright brown eyes and satiny brown skin. Her white transparent appearance was even more emphasized by the natural darkness of her skin. She bore a huge ugly wound on her stomach that seemed to swallow her tiny torso its dark stain. She reminded me of a bird, a pretty nightingale that was made to sing. I knew her name instinctively, but unlike many of the White People who seemed to live on their own plane and to ignore my presence, she stared straight at me, as if finding me out, like a fawn assessing a threat. This might have been the first time I saw her, but it was not the last, she always appeared on the edge of the crowd, or in the distance, posed for flight like a small bird, but intently watching my every movement. After that first time, the wound had disappeared but little else about her changed, her wariness and her interest remained the same. It was also intriguing to see how many of my things disappeared and reappeared in random places during this time, I cannot say for sure that it was Rue, but as I searched, I could feel amusement in the air and I am sure you can see why I wondered if it might have been. Many people equate the dead with sadness or fear, but with both Rue and Little Prim, and indeed many that I have encountered as white People were not sad at all, nor were they anything to fear. They were simply dead. The good were good, the bad were bad, and the mischievous and young hearted remained just as lively.

This continued on for weeks, meanwhile, despite our small and for Peeta's part unseen chaperone, Peeta and I became good friends and when Cinna and Portia invited me back to their house for the first two weeks of the summer, I was quick to accept. My first night there we had a bonfire and a picnic of sorts, I had a glorious evening. It was the first time I had ever roasted ring baloney and hotdogs, having been more accustomed to rabbit stew than the usual food of campouts. It was also the first time I had ever eaten Peeta's cheese buns, and they were to die for. I feel as if I often speak of food in these pages, but if any food deserved a mention in any book it was Peeta's cheese buns. On the outside, they simply looked like normal rolls, but when you bit into them your senses were filled with the rich taste of mozzarella, cheddar, and few other changes I cannot name, mixed with savory spices and the whole thing was contained in a crisp flaky exterior. The first time I had one I just about died of bliss right then and there. Cinna, Portia, and Peeta, all shared a good laugh when they saw my eyes roll back in my head as I first bit into one. Cinna commenting laughingly,

"Well, Peeta I think we can assume that she likes them,"

While Peeta's eyes shone with well-deserved pride and amusement at my extreme reaction. If I had one, I had twenty that night and it was amazing that there were enough to go around, although it is possible the rest of the company avoided them for my sake, as my preference for them was so marked. It was while eating one of these delicious treats and contemplating the flames with Peeta, Cinna, and Portia having gone back to the house, that Rue touched me for the first time. Peeta and I had both grown silent and I was contemplating the play of the light across his beautiful face. The warm flames took his beautiful blue eyes, his light skin, and long tangled lashes and threw them into sharp resolution. His strong body as he lay beside the log, I was perched on was drawn into long strong line and only emphasized by the halo of his hair. I have seen very few things in my life more beautiful than Peeta that night, under a dark sky and relaxing by the glow of the fire in the summer air. It had almost been a year since we had met and I could not help but think of his first conversation to me in which he had admitted that he had loved me for years. Here away from the Mirror, and the memory of my mother made complacent by the soothing and romantic balm of the night I found myself wishing to kiss him.

Was it with this purpose that I leant in towards him, or was it for some other unknown thing that made me move? Would I have kissed him, if I had been left alone? I will never know and the answer is among all the other obscure things that may have in a moment changed the course of any story. Perhaps on some alternate plane, another Katniss kissed him, I did not have that chance. For as I leaned in, I felt a sharp coldness go through me, radiating from the pin I wore on my breast. My instinctive reaction was to look at it and on it, I saw the pale cold hand of one of the White People. Imagine my shock when I followed that arm to look into the face of mischievously grinning Rue.

I must say that she startled me, much in the same way a bug in my hair or an ice cube down my back would have startled me. I say this to explain the high pitch scream I emitted at this juncture and the fact that I jumped back. Rue, laughed at me, much in the same way a mischievous younger sibling would have laughed at having startled an older sibling, and in that moment, she reminded me of Little Prim with such distinctness, that I could not help myself, I laughed with her. Together we stood there laughing together. It is my personal opinion that there is no greater cementer of any relationship than shared laughter or shared tears. In this case, I was fortunate that my relationship with Rue began with laughter. Peeta, however, was substantially less than amused at our antics. Among other things he could not see what had startled me and in his view, I had jumped a mile high only to break down into maniacal laughter five seconds later. He was looking at me like I was insane when I stopped laughing, but whereas a few seconds before he had been the sole object of my attention, now I had very little attention to spare him. All my attention was on Rue, who, after this time checking to see if she had my attention, reached out her hand and touched the Bird. I was instantly transported to another place and time, and I was Rue running for my life before turning to face a slender, half-starved looking, black-haired boy who threw a spear, a spear that pierced my stomach. I was shot through with a massive amount of pain and my whole body began to convulse. Then I felt a warm hand on my arm and was able to center myself by concentrating on that hand. The cold emanating from my breast was pulling me away from this world, into Rue's world and death, but the warm presence of the hand upon my arm was pulling me back. Back to Peeta, to the orchard, and the warm balmy night that might have ended in a kiss by the bonfire.

It may seem as you read this that I was conflicted or torn between these two emotions and these two words, Rue's and Peeta's, but I was not. It was rather as if one could not exist without the other. As if there were two portions of me, and that both were necessary to maintain a whole. The dead played a large role in my life, but at the end of the day, I was a living person and not one of the White People I loved so well. In this case, as he would many times in later dates, Peeta was a symbol of life, of hope. A dandelion in the spring.

Then thorough my vision of Rue's final struggle, for no one could survive such a wound, much less such a small and petite girl, I heard, for the first time, the spoken words of one of the White People. Her words were simple and few, three whistled notes, followed by the words "Help us."

After this, my little songbird disappeared, but not with the ease that I had seen her disappear before. Instead, she seemed to be sucked away as if through a large tube or simply as if her essence was being pulled through the air. It was obvious from her expression that she was going against her own will, for her hand fell from my pin as she was pulled away and her arms flailed as she was drug, as if she was attempting to find something to hold on to, something to keep her by my side and in my world. I had the distinct impression that she had something more to tell me and that someone or something more powerful than herself had a vested interest in seeing her silenced. Goodness knows she fought and struggled against it, and seemed to be in pain. I reached for her, but went right through her, as if we were on different planes and one could not touch the other, I stood there helpless as I saw her drug away, and horror filled me as I saw her mouth open in a silent scream, a scream that was all the more terrifying, due to the fact that it had no sound.

The next thing I heard Peeta was yelling at me.

"Katniss! Katniss! Can you hear me? Are you okay? Katniss!"

I cannot imagine how his mind must have been reeling when I, instead of answering, buried my face into his shoulder and burst into tears.


	11. Cato

**I don't own anything and want to apologize for the delay. This chapter was very difficult for me, there were quite a few elements that would become massively important in later chapters and even more that had to reconciled to chapters that came before this. If I have any obvious plot errors or even subtle plot errors please let me know. I have tried to be aware, but I am really only one, very fallible person. Anyway, thank you to anyone that is reading this! I really appreciate every view I have and jump for joy, maybe literally, for every follow, favorite or review I receive. Thank you!**

Whether I cried for hours or for minutes I will never know, nor do I truly know why I cried. Maybe it was due to powerlessness I had been a witness to, both in Rue's last moments and in her abrupt disappearance. Maybe it was simply a reaction to a drop in adrenaline, or something equally scientific. I will never know. Indeed, it was just another entry on the list of things that I would never understand nor obtain absolute knowledge of. We all believe that we can explore the universe's secrets and that all answers can be explored, we forget how much we do not know, how much we will never know. I can only see the world through my own eyes and feel the emotions it contains within my own heart, but I still think that if I had all the eyes and hearts in the world there would be things far beyond my reach, an impenetrable horizon, a horizon that artists that employ all mediums, the pen, dance, or more traditional art forms, can pierce for a moment. Just for a moment they lift the veil and show us all what is on the other side, and leaves us desperate for another look. For me, it was Rue who lifted this veil and let many things out to haunt my existence, or maybe she was just a harbinger that the veil was to lift. All I know is that after her visit I began to see the White People everywhere. They stood on the edge of everything I did, it was seldom that they took the initiative to approach me, however, and having seen Rue's fate I could hardly wonder why. They must have been scared of sharing the same fate that took her, whatever that might have been. Is it odd to say that I could understand their fear because I was scared too? Not scared of the White People per se but of that force that could apparently cause the White People to be told to come and go, whether or not they willed it. It was as if there was something else, outside of themselves that was their master and their king, and that on that force's command they might be hurt or forced to act in ways that would contrary to their own will. Perhaps I knew instinctively that it was this force that I was born to defeat. Perhaps deep within myself, I knew that it was this force that would pose the most danger to me and all I hold dear. One way or another it scared me, and due to my fear of this unseen force, I began to fear the White People.

Whereas in my childhood, I saw the White People as I saw any other, and in my first brush with Rue I almost felt like a privileged entity to see what no one else seemed to be able to see, I now began to feel foreboding at the sight of the White People and began to desire the comforts of home. I had originally delighted in the odd foods and sights that the world could offer me, and was anxious to leave and go to college. To see new things and to have new experiences, to enter an ocean from the little fishbowl that had comprised my life before it. But now I began to long to return to the forest that was my home and to the familiar sights and sounds that had haunted my childhood. If I had to deal with the White People following my every movement, I felt I would be more equipped to deal with them in my own environment. If I had to fight an unseen and an unknown force, I wanted my surroundings to be something I had seen every day and something that I knew so well that I could depend upon every twig and stone to be where I anticipated it. I wanted to go home. Home to the Mirror. Home to the forest. Home to Haymitch and Sae.

Thus, it was that late one night, when I had only finished one week of the two weeks I had pledged to spend with Cinna, Portia, and Peeta, I walked out into the meadow and took my Mockingjay form and flew to the Mirror. It was as it always was, other than the presence of many White People around its edges, still and quiet. I flew past the cabin and could see Haymitch and Sae through the windows, Haymitch reading something out loud, with his omnipresent glass of liquor beside him, to Sae as she worked on some form of mending. It was both odd and heartwarming to see this little tableau. With the typical selfishness of youth, it never occurred to me that Haymitch and Sae did anything when I wasn't there. It was almost as if their lives began and ended with me, and it was both comforting and strange to realize that they lived without me. That they not only lived without me but seemed to have formed their own form of routine.

As I rounded the lake, however, I saw something that, considering the frequent occurrences of the White People in my life at this time, affected me more than it should have. It was a tall dark-skinned boy, a big boy with skin so dark it almost seemed to deny his status as one of the White People. He reached out his hand towards me as if he knew what I was and despite the things that had happened to Rue, he was desperate to touch me. Maybe this was what threw me about his appearance at this time. Although the White people were making many appearances in my life, so many in fact that I felt I was always in their company, even when I could not see them, they seemed to be as wary of me as I was learning to be of them. They seemed to know that touching me would give them Rue's fate, and that being noticed by the thing that had noticed Rue was to be avoided at all costs. This boy, this man, he was on the cusp between boyhood and manhood and I am loathe to assign either appellation to him, seemed to feel no such wariness. I felt more as if he knew what had happened to Rue, perhaps better than I did, but did not fear it. I said before that I was not sure if he was boy or man, but what I am sure of is that he must have been brave. He seemed to have no fear of the strange fore that seemed to control me and to consume the other White People so thoroughly and reached up to me as if he recognized me and wished to touch me, even in my bird form. However, I lacked the courage he seemed to have in spades and avoided him, hurrying back to Cinna's and Portia's house rather than taking the opportunity to feel the vision and dream this boy-man could give me.

I flew back to Cinna and Portia's house rapidly, for once merely concentrating on the flight rather than the beauty of the things around me. I was running, running from the things that this boy-man would make me see. Running from seeing him torn away from me right after we had made the intimate connection that came from seeing through another's eyes. I didn't want to lose another one of the White People that way. To see them die, only to see them torn away to a fate worse than death, although I had no way of knowing what that fate was. I only felt that if there was fate that the dead seemed to fear so terribly then it must be a fate worse than any form of death.

I flew for some time, not sure where I was running too, only what I was running from, and that I wanted to leave it as far behind me as possible. When you run without a direction to run to, and when your flight is inspired by fear, you tend to run in circles and use more time than sense in your haste to get away. This was much the way my flight went that night. As such it was rather late when I reached Cinna and Portia's house, the house was dark and all its inhabitants seemed to have already entered the strange land slumber takes us too. It was at this juncture that I realized that in my haste to escape for a while, I had neglected to tell anyone that I had left the house. This problem was only a problem due to the fact that I have a habit of perpetually leaving my bedroom door closed, wherever I may be staying. As such it is my assumption that on this night, all the other inhabitants of the house had assumed that I had gone to bed, and had accordingly locked up the house and gone to bed themselves.

Is it odd that I felt a feeling of desperation at this discovery? I wanted to be in the house with others, however unconscious they might be, near me. I could and indeed have spent the night outside, it would be no new thing to sleep tied onto the branches of a tree. Yet filled with the insane fear that had seemed harbored in my body this night, I had no desire to be alone. Usually, I am more at home outside than I ever am trapped within the confines of walls. But tonight, the walls that usually felt as if they were a restricting force, were a comfort I sought, a warm blanket to separate me from the outside world. As such, I soon found an open window, and with extraordinary luck, it was a window to the basement, allowing me great ease as I slipped into the house.

It was Peeta's room, the room that I had entered so indecorously, in my anxiousness to enter the house without waking anyone. The room would have been spartan in appearance if it had not been for the innumerable sketch pads and notebooks scattered around the room. Yet at this stage, I could not have said exactly what his room looked like. For if I am brutally honest, I must admit that I spared very little, if any, time taking in my surroundings. My gaze was automatically drawn to the occupant of the bed. He was beautiful, at that moment all the shields and masks that any living person wears throughout the day were gone and in their place was the peace and trust that is seen only when one is asleep. He was laying on his back with one arm over his head and the other on his chest, his long lashes were tangled together as he slept and his compact body with its strong lines was perfectly at rest. Is there any question why I was transfixed by this image? I had known Peeta was attractive, but at this moment he was beautiful.

I must have dropped all other forms of perception, or else the next incident might never have happened. I had been spellbound by the figure on the bed. However, that spell was broken when I felt a sharp piercing cold come from the mockingjay pin I wore on my breast, and then the room, the bed, and all other things around me melted away.

Once again, I had entered a time and place that I knew nothing about, this time I was confronted with the sight of the dark-skinned boy-man I had seen near the Mirror, the one that had seemed so desperate to touch me, and I knew in an instant that his name was Thresh. No doubt this knowledge came from whoever's hand had touched the bird, for I had little doubt then and even less now, that I had once more entered a death and that this shade of the past, I know him now as Cato, had something to show me. You may ask how I knew such things, I have no answer. I just knew them, and for me at the time and for you now, that must be enough. Thresh was fighting some form of very large dog, a dog with strange colored fur and human eyes, there was a pack of them and he was doing his best to keep them engaged, as were the rest of the men with him.

It was well they did so, for next Cato turned his head, and there I could see a woman very like me who was holding a vial of water, beside her stood the strange dark man with the star-shaped scar that I remembered from my childhood, and now as then he carried in his arms, Little Prim. Katniss, however, seemed to be very entranced by the vial she held so carefully and it was a shock to me to see her pull out a knife and slit her finger letting the blood drip into the vial of water she held. As the blood hit the water it turned into flames and began to smoke. Cato's eyes, and therefore mine, were drawn to the smoke as it spun through the air faster and faster creating a solid plate of grey smoke that shown as it was made of light rather than smoke, this came to rest about eighteen inches off the ground and then the man with the star on his head called out to the men fighting the dogs,

"It's time."

They immediately dropped their weapons and surged as if they were on man towards the shimmering portal, desperate to follow Little Prim, Katniss, and the man I knew as Dark Manuel. The dogs made as if to follow them, but Thresh alone had maintained his position and was attempting to hold of the whole pack, a selfless sacrifice that would allow his companions to escape. I looked toward the portal where men were scrambling to escape and to Thresh. Then I felt Cato's determination as he ran towards Thresh, sword in hand, as the portal closed behind him. The next minutes were filled with snarls and teeth and many swings of a sword, I registered Thresh falling beside me with a dog at his throat, and felt teeth pierce my leg causing me to stumble, and the dog literally ripping my muscle apart. I felt sharp teeth in my arm and felt the gnawing pain of teeth hitting bone, then blessedly I felt a dog at my own throat and the smell of the animals and my surroundings began to fade.

The next I knew I was once more in Peeta's bedroom screaming quietly with choked little noises that were seconds away from tears, I could see Cato being carried away by the same force that made with Little Prim, but on his face was not the fear I saw on hers but fatality. Cato had known his fate and embraced it as a sacrifice to show me his death, a warrior even beyond death. I felt warm arms around me even as Cato disappeared, I've never seen him again.

However even as I tore my eyes from one blond-haired and blue-eyed man, dead eyes that somehow were still filled with purpose and strength, it was to meet another pair of warm blue eyes framed by blond hair, filled with strength and warmth, Peeta's eyes. He was holding me warm solid and alive in a world that seemed at that moment to hold nothing but death, he held me and I clung to him and for a few moments we said nothing, then I heard him say words I never thought I would hear any other living person speak, he said,

"I think I saw something."

I pulled away suddenly, a frantic feeling in my breast, torn between hope, and between fear that Peeta had indeed seen Cato. However, when I spoke my voice seemed oddly calm to my own ears as I said,

"What did you see?"

Peeta answered carefully watching my face intently,

"At first nothing, I just saw you standing there still as a statue looking over my head. Then I saw a mist or fog, white and pale between us. I could see right through it and it seemed to be diaphanous and almost shapeless in every way, all but the hand. I could see a hand touching you here, he said lightly reaching out his hand to caress the mockingjay pin on my breast. It was translucent but kept its shape, it was man's hand, very young strong and well built. I was mesmerized by it, then I saw it pull away and become part of the mist, which then began to disappear like it had been sucked up by a vacuum. That's when I pulled you into my arms. You bitterly cold, you are bitterly cold."

At that, he put his hands on my shoulders and held me at arm's length subjecting me to intense scrutiny. He seemed to be looking for any type of injury, only stopping when I said,

"I'm fine. Can you just hold me for a bit though?"

He nodded and we made our way to the bed to lie down. I had no intention of falling asleep and I'm not sure I could have slept that night anywhere else, but I was cold, and infinitely tired and he was warm and solid in a world that seemed to currently shifting as easily as quicksand and continually pulling me into something that was deeper and bigger the further, I fell into it. Peeta seemed secure and safe to me and as I lay there, I fell asleep. I'm sure he had many questions to ask and I had a few of my own. I was both mentally and emotionally exhausted, just then and Peeta must have known it for he said nothing else that night, a silent pact being made to speak of it in the morning, for now, warmth, company, and slumber played a sirens song, and sleep took us both captive into her silent embrace.


	12. The Kiss

**All of the characters and even much of the words and plotline are the property of Suzanne Collins.**

The next morning, I found myself waking up to an empty and cold bed. My first feeling was one of disorientation, of not knowing where I was and of being in a strange bed and in a strange, and until this point unknown room. Then the entire thing came rushing back to me. The fear that had consumed me by the Mirror, being locked out of the house, the pain of Cato's death and disappearance, and the final jubilant and terrifying confession of Peeta's that he too, had seen something. I pushed myself up from the bed an took a hurried look around the room, half expecting to be alone, but thereby the bed sat Peeta. He was drawing in a sketchbook, the early morning sun lighting up his face and drawing attention to the lines of concentration in his face. Whatever image it was he was expressing upon its pages, must have taken up much of his attention, for it was a few minutes after my spotting him that he realized I was awake. Then he set aside his sketchbook and said,

"So, I told you what I saw last night, Katniss. Now I want to know, what did you see?"

At his inquiry, I filled him in on all that I had seen. I told him of seeing Thresh by the Mirror, and of Cato's death. Then I said,

"Peeta, I don't know if I can do this. I see their deaths and then I am forced to see them disappear. It's like losing them twice in quick succession. For a few moments we share the deepest bond any two beings can share, looking through each other's eyes, and then they are gone. Not only once but twice. I don't think I can do this."

His eyes held a world of compassion in them as he said,

"Katniss they are coming to you for a reason, they need you. Can you tell them no?"

I knew then as I know now that I could not, but that has never made it easy. As far as I could tell I was the only person who could even see them, I said no, they had no one else to turn to. I could not tell them no. As such there was not much to be said about whether or not I could do it. I had to do it, instead, I said to Peeta,

"So, what do you make of it?"

He laughed, just a little shakily and said,

"Of what? What I saw? What you saw? Of the whole thing?"

I had to have my own nervous laugh at this moment and said,

"I guess, of everything…"

"Right, so, I guess I'm going to start with what you saw then," he said hesitantly looking at me as if for approval, although I made no movement, he must have seen it in my eyes for he continued on in a firmer tone. I think that Cato and Thresh deliberately wanted you to see what you saw and that leaves me with the conclusion that it must have been important, not just to them but to whatever your role in all this is."

"Why do you think that?" I asked.

He seemed to hesitate then and proceeded slowly and said,

"The presence of the first Katniss Everdeen, and her use of the portal, the gateway, I don't know," shaking his head with just a touch of exasperation entering his tone, "whatever it was that she used to pull them away from there." Then his voice grew soft as he said, very slowly as if afraid of what my reaction might be,

"I think the stuff she mixed her blood into was water from the Mirror."

At this, I flinched as if he had hit me, and I could see my flinch across his face as well as if he had anticipated and feared such a reaction. But I couldn't help it. If Peeta were right, and I knew in my hearts of hearts that he was, then it would prove that the Mirror was connected to this shadowy world that had someone enveloped me. I had considered the idea. Although I am not exceptionally good at anything and more than awkward in my way, I am not a complete idiot. I had known that much of what was happening seemed to be attached to the Mirror. I had gone so far as to conjecture that my own abilities might lie in my weird upbringing by its shores, as a sort of wild and strange creation raised by people as odd as myself and the mystery of the world that surrounded me. I had lived in the knowledge that the lake I loved so well was the cause of my father's death and my mother's body's presence in my childhood. I knew both my parents were buried in its depths. Yet can you blame me if I tell you that despite all that, it had been my home and that now it seemed as if my home was conspiring against me. As if in this final action, this final conspiracy with something that was causing me distress, my childhood sanctuary had turned against me and at long last become a form of enemy.

Peeta must have seen some of this on my face. I have never been worldly enough to be able to hide, with any form of grace, the play of emotions upon my face. A trait that to those who did not really know me could make me seem to be an open book ready for all common observers to read. As such he said,

"I am not saying that I know that for certain, Katniss. Just that I suspect." His voice trailed off and I, in turn, found myself wanting to reassure him. Thus, it was with great effort that I restrained the turmoil of feelings that had been assaulting me ruthlessly for so long and put them in a dark box deep in my mind to be reexamined when I was without an audience and I had the time and leisure to deal with implications.

"No," I said putting on a brave face, and if my voice wavered a little here, I hope none will hold it against me, "I know your right. It just means…"

Peeta chimed in softly at this point saying,

"That it feels like you have no home."

I met his eyes at that juncture and remembered that he too, had no home. That he too, saw things that no one else saw, and that he was the only person in the world who might know how I felt. Something passed between us as we sat there staring at each other, some understanding that marked us as something intrinsically the same. We both belonged to the same world and for once I felt as if I were no longer alone. The moment was intense, almost too intense and I felt that box, deep in my own mind rattle, with an urge to be opened. Yet now was not the time and as such, I was the one who broke the moment by saying,

"So," with a little laugh at the break in the tension that filled the room in the moment before. "What did you think of what you saw?"

He laughed a little too responding, "Well, I'm not sure what to think. I do wonder if I am not meant to accompany you, my visions, paintings, and now this last thing seems to insinuate that we're in this together."

His analysis came at the end of the moment, and so it was with no sense of doubt that I was able to respond,

"I think we are."

This, however, led to another of those odd moments, those moments that seemed to be native to Peeta and whatever it was that felt so strange at such time, and this time it was Peeta who broke the spell saying,

"Cinna and Portia are probably wondering where we are. Come on, we should probably get up."

At this, he pulled me to my feet and we left his room and apartment. I went to my own room and freshened up. I can only assume Peeta must have gone to seek Cinna and Portia, for when I had finished, I came down to wonderful breakfast. Perhaps the one thing that sticks out the most about breakfast was my amusement at watching Peeta dip his roll into his hot chocolate. This was an infinitely amusing thing to do until I tried it. Then Portia and Cinna had their own moment of hilarity as they watch me effective ignore the rest of the meal in my pursuit of more of the combination of crusty hot bread and rich warm chocolate.

After that Peeta, Cinna, Portia, and I all went for a walk and brought a picnic lunch. It was a glorious day. One of those warm and balmy days in which everything is painted in brilliant colors and the joy permeates every pore of your being. We walked to a beautiful park with an incredible flower garden that is a riot of pink and two-toned carnations, dusky purple pansies hidden underneath the trees. The scent of lavender drifting through the air and tickling our noses with its clean scent. The entire thing was like a beautiful fairy garden that seemed to happen not merely to exist as if a fairy had created the entire thing to be their dwelling place and had chosen the flowers to speak to them in their own language in their unique beauty. I was not at all surprised to hear that Cinna and Portia had sponsored the original landscaping of the place and that between the two of them, they had also designed the entire thing. After all, it was almost impossible not to see an artist's hand among the beauty of this place, there was but one shadow among the beauty of this place, a bench surrounded by anemone's saying, "Death only comes to those that are forgotten, remember us." The Cinna and Portia's full names. It was a reminder of Cinna's illness that allowed death to penetrate the beauty of even this idyllic day. In a way it seemed to me to also be a shrine to the White People, those that were remembered, but more so those that were not, and I felt, at this moment, almost proud to be the one person who could still see and remember these individual's, many who might have otherwise been forgotten.

If the bench was a reminder of mortality, however, nothing else about the day was. We laughed and joked, and Peeta and I amused ourselves by playing catch with an apple he retrieved from Portia's basket. Then a little later Portia and Peeta sketch the scenery while Cinna and I amuse ourselves by tying knots in some vines we had broken off from a tree, and distracting them with his lively and witty chatter, and my less sparkling responses. The day passes by in a blur of happiness, and not once do a see one of the White People lurking by the edges of this tableau of joy. However, like all good things, even the best of days must come to an end, and we are only left with their memory, sweet and gentle like a warm spring breeze. As such time passes by, and this day too must come to an end.

By late afternoon Cinna and Portia profess to be tired, after being a partner in the secret of his illness, I now wonder how I missed it. He seems to tire easily, and it is only Portia's watchful eye, and her declarations of being tired that keep him from wearying himself, as such they start back towards the house, walking slowly. They leave us with a promise to have dinner waiting when we return and an injunction to take our time. Yet, Peeta and I must have not been entirely untouched by the day, for we soon find ourselves sitting under a lilac bush. In my case, it might be more appropriate to say that I am lying under the lilac bush my head in Peeta's lap, making a crown of flowers, while he fiddles with my hair braiding it a thoroughly content fashion. It seems like a respite, a calm before a great storm that is brewing as if the White People have decided to give us this day and this moment to recover from our hectic night and the subsequent confessions of the morning. Peeta must have felt it too I can feel his hands grow still after a while and I ask,

"What?"

"I wish I could freeze this moment, right here, right now, and live in it forever," he says in response to my question.

Usually this type of comment, a comment that hints at the love he professed to me that day in the studio, would leave me feeling guilty and awful that I cannot return his love. The comment would make me think of my mother and my promise not to marry, my promise not to love as my mother had loved. My promise to myself to not let anyone destroy me as my mother had been destroyed by my father's death. But I feel so warm and relaxed, and everything seems to be coming to such a climax that I cannot bring myself to worry about a future that I more and more suspect that I may never have. After all, how many times can you waltz with death before he claims you for his own, with these thoughts the word just slipped out,

"Okay."

I can hear the smile in his voice, as rich as melted cheese in savory bread,

"Then you'll allow it?"

"I'll allow it."

At this point, his smile is as beautiful as the sunset behind him with its spectacular orange and yellows, and under this light, I feel Peeta's hand wrap around me as I help him pull me up into my first kiss, a gloriously beautiful, if a little awkward and inexperienced kiss.

* * *

Flower Meanings:

Carnations - Pink ("I will never forget you"). The two-toned version means "I cannot be with you."

Pansy - thoughtfulness, and remembrance.

Lavender: Devotion

Anemone: fragility

Lilac: the first emotions of love


	13. Hijacked

**I don't own anything in this story, except for the mistakes, those I claim. All that being said I have to apologize for the delay this chapter has had as well for its shortness. College homework has piled up and I have had kiddos in the hospital. These combined with work has made time a precious commodity. Anyway, thank you for reading this as well as for all your support for this story, not to mention your wonderful patience. It is amply appreciated.**

This was the last truly good day that I was too have for a long time, a day made all the sweeter by the kiss that marked its closing and the promise that kiss implied of some deeper communion between Peeta and myself. A promise that whatever the future might hold we would face it as a united front. It was well that I had the memory of that day, the memory of that promise, and the memory of that kiss, for whatever had made the White People shy away before seemed to no longer give them any cause for hesitation. I was brutally assaulted by visions in the days that followed. Like the poundings of gigantic fists upon my body, the visions of death pounded upon my mind. I no longer remember when these visions happened, only what they contained. The only other thing that sticks in my memory is the fortunate fact that the ghosts only touched the pin when I was with Peeta.

This may, however, have been a fortunate side effect, that I was seldom without Peeta. Indeed, the only time I left Peeta after this day, other than for reasons of personal hygiene, caused an event that I will not easily. This event came about, not by any vision of mine, but one that came to Peeta. I had been upstairs in my own room, reading some book based on myths and legends of the natives to this area, when I heard Portia scream rise up the stairs to confront me. I ran down the stairs and into the morning room where Peeta and Portia had set up their easels earlier that day. There I could see Peeta. His eyes were black and his limbs were stiff. His movements were erratic and his limbs and hands seemed to convulse in some strange dance in which any eye could see his mind was neither the master no directing. Portia stood to one side with a pale countenance, but I bore her little mind, just taking notice of her presence and no more. My attention was devoted to Peeta. I ran to him and began to shake him and call out his name hoping to pull him from whatever dream seemed to have him in its unrelenting grip. After several minutes of this, I could see him return to himself and his eyes, once black, began to return to the beautiful blue that usually filled their depths. Yet just as I thought that I had gotten through to him the vision, or fit once more took over his body, and the darkness once more took over his countenance. As I watched horrified at this abrupt change, I could feel his hands lock around my neck.

How can one describe being strangled? Especially by someone that they care for so dearly. I will attempt to describe it, but I can assure you that my description pales in comparison to the real assault of emotions and fear that overtake you at such a moment. Perhaps the most frightening thing was knowing that the person I thought I knew was no longer there. As he had wrapped his hands around my throat, he had pushed his face close to mind and rather than the blue depths I admired in his eyes, there was nothing there. I have described his eyes as black earlier in this account, but perhaps it would be more correct to say that they had no color at all. As if nothing was behind his eyes and they were simply a portal to some strange, undefined, and terrifying place.

Although this was the most frightening part of the experience it cannot be denied that feeling my throat constrict under his hands as he tightened them was not pleasant, to say the least, either. It felt as if there was a giant spider in my throat spinning a web of thick thread that restricted my breathing more with each thread it put into place. By some strange instinct, I found my hands on his own throat and I could feel each beat of his heart. How could I reach him? Peeta would be horrified if I died in such a fashion, and although I loved them, I had no desire to be one of the White People. So, with all my might I pushed all that I am and might be at Peeta through my fingertips, using the last of my waning strength in this odd attempt to reach him. Then I knew no more.

When I awoke it was to the pale face of Peeta staring at me and I am ashamed to say that I flinched. My last memory had been of him robbing me of my life through his fingertips and my first reaction was to be scared. I immediately felt bad when I saw his handsome face fall and he turned away from me. I could not allow this to happen. Yes, his body had tried to kill me. But I knew better than anyone that life or presence often has nothing to do with the body. I knew it had not been Peeta that tried to strangle me. A fact that terrified me, but also absolved Peeta of all blame and as I saw him turn away, I reached out my hand and grabbed his pulling him towards me. It had been my intention to speak to him and tell him of this great truth. But when I opened my mouth all that came out was a strange little cough and then a sound that resembled, more than anything else, a croak. This was every bit as effective of anything I might have said, however. For Peeta reached for a glass of water by my bed, and rather than moving away put his arm around my shoulders to help me sit up to drink it while explaining.

"Cinna and Portia are waiting for a doctor. They want him to come and see if there will be any lasting damage."

At this point, the glass of water had finally moved to my lips and I am at a loss to explain how wonderful and how painful that cool liquid felt on my battered throat. I may have attempted to describe being strangled but that juxtaposition of sensations I am forced to leave to your own imagination. I can only hope that I am not leaving it to your own experience. Peeta had continued on saying,

"I am so sorry Katniss. I'm not sure what happened there. I don't really remember. First, was I painting with Portia and she had reached over to correct me in some way. Then the next thing I knew I could hear your voice, but I couldn't hear your voice, it was almost like it was coming from my own mind, calling my name. Then I woke up to you lying beneath me and my hands on your throat. I almost killed you. Katniss, I almost killed you."

His face was in his hands and I could feel his despair and his helplessness as I watched tears fall down his face. I could only imagine how hard it must be for him. If it was hard for me to see his body occupied by something else. How much harder must it be to realize that your body had hurt something you cared for and you could neither control it nor remember what it had done? It must have been miserable. I can only imagine and I am not sure I want to do that.

Fortunately, he had already set down the glass. Leaving both his hands free. I reached out to grab one and when his eyes met mine. Now his eyes were a clear blue with only warmth and honesty in their beautiful depths, made even more bright by the sparkle of the tears they contained. I looked into them and forced myself to speak. It hurt, oh how it hurt, but with a great amount of effort I managed to croak out,

"It… wasn't…you."

His eyes seemed confused as I said this, whether this was because what I said confused him, or because what I said was unintelligible is anyone's guess. Seeing his confusion, nonetheless, was unbearable to me and I put my hand on his cheek. Then I choked out yet another string of torturous words.

"Just your body… not you."

His eyes lit with understanding and then he said simply,

"Thank you."

Tears once more streamed down his face. But despair had no more purpose on him and I could see his relief. It is eminently important to me that you understand what I am trying to say here as well as I think he understood the meaning behind my broken words that day. It was not Peeta's fault. Something or someone had overtaken his body. Peeta would never hurt me. Peeta has never hurt me. How could he? Peeta is warm, gentle, and cheery. He is hope. He is all that is most good in the world. The only violence he utilizes is in defense of his family or his person. As such it is imperative for me to relay that my Peeta would never harm me.

It was at this juncture that Dr. Aurelius entered the room. Dr. Aurelius was a portly man with a white mustache and a loud obnoxious bowtie that could have only been chosen for its ugliness. His hair was covered in grey curls, but his voice was soft and soothing. His voice with its warm tones and soft, so soft that it was almost hard to hear him, dictation was a direct contrast to his unmistakable and almost puckish appearance.

"So, what do we have here?" He said in a gentle voice.

I was later to find that Cinna and Portia had chosen this doctor for his belief in the supernatural. I was such a naïve schoolgirl in those days that it never occurred to me to wonder whether or not a doctor would turn in an incident that looked like domestic abuse. There was no mistaking the dark bruises on my neck for anything other than handprints. But he never asked. Neither Peeta not I were required to make the least bit of explanation as to the origin of those bruises. Cinna and Portia had briefed him to our situation and I now know that he knew as much that day of Peeta and myself as we did. I cannot thank him enough for believing Cinna and Portia. In hindsight this visit could have been excruciating with any other doctor. Dr. Aurelius asked no awkward questions, at least not at this visit, and did not question us about the unique position in which fate had placed us. He simply did his work thoroughly and seemed to be quite a capable doctor. His main job seemed to be allaying all our immediate concerns with his cheerful examination and his soft commentary as it progressed. There was no damage to my spinal cord, airways, or arteries. There was only bruising, hoarseness, and a sore larynx, I could almost see Peeta's relief when we were informed that there was no permanent damage to my vocal cords. He would have mourned my voice more than I would have. I was a quiet little thing, a schoolgirl with halting speech at the best of times. As such my voice had little value to me, I would have barely missed it. But Peeta, he treasured the voice of his Mockingjay, he has never forgotten the voice that made even the birds stop to listen.

All throughout his visit, Dr. Aurelius kept up his cheerful professionalism, bidding us goodbye at the end of his visit with perfect equanimity. Only now do I understand his earnestness when he said at the end of the visit.

"If you need anything else, anything at all in which a doctor might be some use, please give me a call."

This was accompanied by a business card with the clinic number crossed out and his personal number written on the back in ink. Which Peeta had promptly slipped into his pocket.

Portia and Cinna showed the good doctor out, but Peeta remained by my side. Shortly after the doctor left the room, I began to feel tired and sleep soon overtook me as I sat with my faithful guardian by my side. My dreams, however, were far from peaceful. That night as I lay sleeping, I must have been touched by one of the White People.


	14. A Dream of Fear

**Despite my huge crush on Peeta Mellark and my deep empathy for Katniss as a big sister, I don't own them. Everything in this work pertaining to them or to any other character is Suzanne Collins. I also want to apologize, as usual, for the wait, I am never quite as prompt as I intend to be. Thank you to anyone still reading this. I thoroughly appreciate it.**

This at least was my conclusion, for as I lay sleeping that night I was haunted by a terrible dream. I dreamt that I was fighting with a boy, and that try as I might I could not see his face. We struggled and I could feel the boy's knife penetrate my eyes. Blood trickled down my face and I was blinded. The pain was terrible and it seemed to paralyze me, even while it drove me to madness. When the pain reaches those heights, the man is enveloped in a screaming animal, an animal ravenous to stop the very pain that drives it. It was all consuming and it was in this pain-filled haze, half driven by the adrenaline of survival that I swung my ax. It must have hit something for I could fill the rush of warm sticky blood hit my fingers. At this, the weight of the boy that had been on top of me staggered away and I thought for a minute that I had won. That through some wild chance I had reached a vital organ with my ax and that I would survive. I would survive and go back to my family. I could see my little sister and I could imagine my mother's face when I came back to her. I would escape. Then I felt a heavy weight hit the back of my head and for one impossible second my eyes cleared and I saw the face of the boy. What happened at this point I do not know. Only that I awoke with Peeta scrambling to his feet from the chair beside and from my throat came some form of continuous agonizingly painful grunt that, if my larynx had not been injured would have been tortured screams.

It was painful, but I couldn't stop. The horror was forced through my throat past my battered vocal cords to fill the air with my pained gasps of terror. I imagine they themselves must have been terrifying, both in their intensity and in their resemblance to the sounds that an animal would make as it lay dying. I had heard such coarse grunts of coming from deer in their last moments. I never thought I would be making them myself.

If Peeta feared them, it seemed only to be that I was forced to make them. For as he scrambled from his chair, he had first made a visual sweep of the room before wrapping his arms around me and doing his best to soothe me. For some time, this was a vain task. Despite the fact that he was warm and steady I was horrified by what I had lived through. I was horrified by what I, in my dream at least, had done. Some things you can never go back from and I knew that this was just one more of those things in the long list of life-changing events that seemed to be plaguing me. Eventually, Peeta's soothing broke through and I began to calm. If my throat had ached before, there were no words for the pain that inflamed it now. Peeta, after calming me down wanted to leave the bed and return to his post on the chair, but this I could not allow. I needed him. I needed him for the warm the warmth he could give me. I needed the companionship, and perhaps most of all I needed him to wake me from the nightmares. For apparently not even sleep was a haven from whatever terror the White People saw fit to impress upon me. made all the worse due to my inability to communicate. So that night I lay once more in Peeta's arms. As I lay there, I found myself reliving over and over all I had seen and could not stop myself from shivering. The boy that had killed that White Person was no other than my father figure, teacher, and mentor, Haymitch Abernathy.

The worst part of it was that I knew why he had done it. If he was like the person, he killed he had just wanted to go home, but I didn't want to believe. We all live with a belief that if forced to kill to survive that we would. But to face that your mentor killed another child when he was little more than a child himself is a hard pill to swallow. Although I knew of Haymitch's drinking problem, I guess a part of me always believed that he was inviolate in his way. Inviolate and impregnable, he was the closest thing to father I had ever had, and in my heart of hearts, I loved him like one. Seeing him as a hurt scared young boy, killing another girl was painful and was a realization that my mentor is only human with his own flaws, sins, and past. I was somewhat aware of the first two, but the last came as shock. Not because I had never thought of Haymitch as having a past but because I had never been forced to confront the fact that he was young, hearty, and scared in that past. I suppose I had always seen him as a smaller version of his adult self, not as a young vulnerable boy that would kill to get home.

Another thing that I was starting to realize was that every vision the White People had given me had a purpose. Rue was to familiarize me with the idea of the White People and their unique way of reaching me. I think they must have understood her similarity to Little Prim and accordingly my ability to easily sympathize with her. Cato had been chosen to show me the portal. Now they apparently wanted me to talk to Haymitch, but how could you bring something of this nature up. There was no easy way. I pondered these and many more questions that had appeared from the strange mess that the fabric of my life had taken, warm and safe in Peeta's arms until eventually, sleep overtook me.

The next day Dr. Aurelius came back and I was told that the damage that I had done to my throat the night before would take a week or more to repair. I think that Peeta, or indeed anyone with eyes, could see how adversely this affected me. There was much to be said and I was desperate to voice the contents of my dream to Peeta, I was also desperate to obtain a more thorough explanation of his own fit from him. Yet all this would have to wait until I could once more speak. Peeta tried to communicate with me via note and other written forms of communication. We also all got very good at miming, but it is nigh impossible to have a deep soul-searching conversation on paper. The topics that we were going to explore would be difficult and I wanted for us to both have the full use of our ability to communicate before treading into the dark the passages that I wanted to explore. Do not take from this that I spent this week in bed. Will you believe me when I say that I spent it almost entirely in my mockingjay form. Peeta had been familiar with the idea of me as a shape-shifter, but this was his first real experience with me as a mockingjay. Indeed, this was my first experience as a mockingjay for any true length of time. It was both as glorious as it was taxing. Glorious due to the unique freedoms that this form gave me. It was also glorious because it gave me a fool-proof excuse for not telling Peeta of my dream and putting my family before him to be judged. Taxing, because despite my form I was still imprisoned with only my own mind for company. The thoughts that coursed through could find no other resource but more of the same thoughts to keep them company, no the solace that I might have been able to find by sharing them. No resolution to the fear that haunted me, how would Peeta be able to trust a girl raised by a murderer. Nonetheless, there was much to enjoy in my chosen form.

Not least among these was Peeta's look of delight at my initial transformation nor the ease with which he accepted my new shape. I was as ever in his company in these days as I ever had been in human form. I would fly about him as he painted or sit on his shoulder as Cinna, Portia, and he conversed. Dinner was perhaps the biggest difficulty, but none of the company I met with in these days seemed opposed to me taking the soups that were my main food option as a bird. I would dip my mouth into the soups and then pull back abruptly to swallow. Even in this form allowing the muscles in my throat to work was painful, unfortunately, my injuries didn't just vanish as I changed shape, a phenomenon I found often in the fictional cases that had comprised my initial look at my time as were-bird, for lack of a better phrase, a shape-shifter. I wish it would have been the case. It would have been a useful perk to my bird form, both at this juncture and later in our adventures.

At length the week passed and after a thorough examination Dr. Aurelius cleared me for any activity that I might choose to pressure, short of being strangled again, including but not limited to talking. I was thrilled. At any other time, my inability to talk would have been a minor inconvenience, but at the moment I, for once, had so much I wanted to say. As soon as we could be excused Peeta and I made our way to the orchard and through it to the same field where I had taken bird form so long ago. It may seem strange to say after my soliloquy on how I had longed for speech that neither of us spoke on our way there. Peeta and I could do that, not speak for long periods of time without either of us feeling uncomfortable. At the time I was unaware of his thoughts, but I knew mine, and they were more than enough to trouble me. I was anxious to know how his fit felt to him. Is fit the right word, it was more like a hijacking of his mind by some other force. Perhaps I will call it hijacking, for lack of a better word. However, there is simply no good way to approach your close friend, and perhaps a little more, about their body being used by another entity to strangle you. The next thing I wanted to approach with him was my dream.

This, however, was a more personal note and I was anxious about it, to say the least. Peeta had never met Haymitch and I wanted them to like each other. How, then, could I tell Peeta that my father figure was a murderer and closely attached to the story we seemed to be living? How would it affect him? Could he trust and love the foster daughter of a man who was a killer even as a child. Speaking would also force me to confront my own thoughts about the dream and see them in the tangible form that writing or speaking words makes ideas take. As of yet my own confusion about what I had seen had been forced into the confines of my own mind, how was I to make enough sense of it to speak of it to Peeta.

Even after we reached the field neither of us spoke for a time, we simply laid there in the long grass with our faces shielded from each other by the fronds of nearly waist-high grass that made us separate entities in the same world only feet away from each other. To my astonishment, it was Peeta who spoke first,

"You have to be wondering about that . . . thing . . . the thing that made me . . ."

At this interval, his voice broke off, so I continued for him,

"I am calling it hijacking because something else took over for you. I know it wasn't you Peeta, but I am curious."

I think my boldness was aided by the shelter of the grass, I did not have to see his face and could ask the questions without seeing what effect they had on him. He was silent then I heard his voice, every bit as hesitant as it had been before.

"It has – happened before, but never like that – I mean I've never hurt anyone before. Portia actually used to call it my genius, as a joke. I'm an excellent artist in my own right and the picture that actually got Portia's interest, to begin with, was mine, I mean I was just me when I painted it." He seemed to be reassuring both me and himself of his own skill at this point, something I never doubted.

"But all my life I would have these . . . spells - fits, maybe, I guess hijacking works, but in them, I would just not be there for a time. I'm not sure how to put it. I don't know Katniss; I would paint something I couldn't remember painting." Here his voice was half frantic as he sought to make me understand, even sitting up to look in my face from his former lying position. Cocooning us both into the bubble of his thoughts and fears. I raised my hand and for one glorious moment felt the softness of his hair and the prickliness of his cheek as I ran my hand down his face.

This affectionate act seemed to make him continue and there were tears on his cheek as he said more calmly,

"The first pictures I ever showed you were done when I was, what was it called it? Hijacked. It seems to allow me to draw things beyond my understanding, I had thought it was like your White People visions, but now... ." and he paused hopelessly. Then I cut in,

"Now it is still like my White People visions and we deal with it. I'm not sure what it is, but, um, we're not really sure of anything here, are we? That got me a watery smile and he said,

"No, I suppose it's all conjuncture."

This joint acknowledgment seemed to ties us together again as we shared a look that was half tenderness for the person we looked at and half thankfulness that someone else in the world was as helpless as we felt.

Then Peeta spoke again,

"So, what was your dream about?"

That was the question I had been both anticipating and dreading, now it was my turn to be hesitant.

"I dreamed of . . . one of the White People."

He looked at me expectantly and I could see in his eyes the question, _so how is that different from any other White People vision_. So, I continued,

"The person I was I living through . . . Peeta it was brutal, I've never seen something so terrible, none of my dreams have been like this, but that wasn't the most terrible part. Peeta, the person who killed her was Haymitch."

The silence that followed these words was full and absolute. Perhaps it was just imagination but it seemed as if even the birds and the wind were silent. The world seemed to wait, just as I was, for Peeta's response. It was as if everything I knew depended on his reaction and I could not help but wonder if this was how he felt when I was choking out my words of understanding just after his hijacking. Then he said slowly,

"So, how do we feel about that?"

Hearing his response, I felt the words flow out of me as if they were a torrent.

"I'm not sure. I now know that these kids were forced to fight, and they seemed to think that winning would let them go home. I don't know yet who took them, but it seems those kids that were taken so long ago, two by two were forced to fight to the death in some way. The reward seemed to be to go home. Haymitch was one of them, but Peeta does that mean the victors did come home or did he escape by some other means. He was so young, no more than fifteen, that is so young to kill a person. Is that why he drinks? Peeta, what happened to those kids, why did they fight and what were they fighting for? And if Haymitch was so old how was Primrose so young? She couldn't have been more than twelve and then she would have to be a small twelve. A very small twelve. Rue was small too, why children?" I have so many questions and no answers and it seems to keep getting closer and closer to me. Peeta they want something from me, I am a part of this. You are a part of this, and Haymitch, Portia, Cinna, and maybe even Sae. I feel so helpless I don't even know what they want of me, much less how to do it, and what if the White People are hurting. Did they all die like that? Are they all murdered or can they be from any form of death, Peeta, I'm so lost . . ." And at that I began to sob, I was so overwhelmed and Peeta just took me in his arms and let me cry.

I feel as if both Peeta and I cried so much during these events, but it was so much. It is one thing to look a horror you understand in the face and accept it as it is, but it is another to feel so lost. We were lost swept away by forces that were overwhelming us. It had to go that way and now I understand but as Peta held me without answering and my tears subsided it seemed like too much. So much during this time seemed like too much, and the result was tears.

There seemed to be no words to say after this, there was a cloak that had settled over us both, a cloak of tiredness and we just lay there staring at the clouds. My head lay on Peeta's chest my face still crusty from the salt of my tears and his shirt bearing the same signs of my distress. After a long period, I felt his voice rather than hear it as he said,

"I suppose you'll want to go home then?"

My voice was small and frail as I answered him,

"Will you come with me?"

Then he forced a shaky smile from him as I heard the word that would later become our promise to each other

"Always"


End file.
